Open legal databases on migration

Welcoming remark

Protecting Migrant Workers Without a Compass

When her son’s wages from abroad stopped arriving, a mother in Cianjur went to the village head, who wanted to help but did not know which law applied.

Going to a trusted person rather than a government office is not a sign of ignorance. In fieldwork with Beth Lyon of Cornell Law School in two farmworker communities in rural West Java, I found that people understand their rights through their relationships with family, neighbors and respected figures. Beth Lyon and I call this the “relational self”. Justice is not imagined as an abstract right claimed alone before the state; it is pursued together, through people one trusts.

Indonesia’s law on the protection of migrant workers was written with a different picture in mind. Law No. 18 of 2017 and the UN Migrant Workers Convention, which Indonesia ratified through Law No. 6 of 2012, assume a worker who reads the contract, knows their rights and complains in their own name. In practice, the law reaches workers only when an intermediary has mastered it: paralegals and advocates at legal aid institutes, officers of migrant worker organizations, staff of local manpower offices and one-stop service centers, village officials, and officials in ministries and at Indonesian missions abroad.

Working without a compass

This is where the problem lies. Most of these intermediaries, activists and officials alike, work without a compass. Not for lack of good will, but because they seldom have a whole picture of the global and comparative legal map: what international law requires, how other countries of origin regulate the same matter, what the law says in countries of destination, and how courts elsewhere have decided similar cases.

The consequences show in many decisions. Policy is often a reaction to whichever case is in the news, such as a temporary halt to placements, without being weighed against the experience of other countries of origin. Restrictions on women’s departure are still seen as protection, although the CEDAW Committee’s General Recommendation No. 26 regards them as discrimination. Memoranda of understanding are negotiated without a comparison table. Civil society campaigns often borrow frameworks from Europe or North America, while complaints to international mechanisms are seldom tried because few people know which doors are open.

I do not mean to blame anyone. Such knowledge is scattered across dozens of government websites, official gazettes and court archives, in many languages, and it is often not free.

International initiatives have not helped much either. Most migration indexes and databases are designed, funded and run from the most developed countries, so their questions are those countries’ questions: asylum, integration, naturalization and control of arrivals. The issues closest to Indonesian workers, such as placement-fee debt, work permits tied to a single employer, the exclusion of domestic workers and farmworkers from labor law, and the role of countries of origin, receive little attention. Almost none were designed with a village in Cianjur or a district office in Indramayu in mind.

To fill that gap, the Institute for Migrant Rights in Cianjur has spent several years building the open legal databases on this site, helped by many volunteers, most of them law students from many countries. All of them can be downloaded and are explained in everyday language, in Indonesian and English.

They are free, cheap and, above all, meant to be hassle-free to use: no account, no subscription and no special software. A browser is enough, and the data come as files that open in an ordinary spreadsheet.

For NGOs and legal aid institutes

IMR’s online International Legal Clinic guides workers, or those assisting them, to the UN body or regional mechanism that may be able to receive their case, and then drafts a complaint that is reviewed with IMR advocates. It is an additional route, not a substitute, for litigation and mediation already under way.

The Migration Jurisprudence from the South database holds nearly 500 decisions from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, searchable by the arguments judges accepted or rejected. An advocate suing a placement agency, for example, can see how Philippine courts have held agencies jointly liable with employers abroad. The directory of free legal help helps refer victims to organizations in the country where they work, and the ratification and comparison data can be cited in shadow reports to the UN Committee on Migrant Workers.

For central and local government

The Countries of Origin page sets Indonesia beside the Philippines, Vietnam, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan on nine questions, from the licensing of placement agencies and fees to restrictions on departure and reintegration. Ministries can use it when drafting implementing regulations or considering a revision of Law No. 18 of 2017. The pages on countries of destination, from domestic workers in Hong Kong and fishing crews in Taiwan to the legal frameworks of the Gulf states, can serve as starting material for bilateral negotiations.

The Migration Law Atlas and the Farmworker Norms Atlas record more than 80 international and regional instruments and their ratification status in 187 countries, which helps in weighing the ILO conventions Indonesia has not yet ratified, for example on domestic workers and on fishing crews. District offices and village officials can use the plain-language explanations in outreach, and the decisions database can be used in training judges and prosecutors.

For universities

Legal education in Indonesia still rests on the interpretation of provisions and doctrine, while questions about how law works in practice are seldom tested with data. Every rule and decision in IMR’s databases is coded on the same variables, with a codebook and its sources, so that students can write undergraduate, master’s and doctoral theses that test legal questions in measurable ways. Comparative law courses can also look to the Philippines, South Africa, Kenya or Colombia, countries whose problems are closer to Indonesia’s. University law clinics can use all these tools in practice, and help check the data at the same time.

An invitation to work together

I want to stress that these databases are not final. This is a first version, published early on purpose so that it can be tested and corrected. Many entries still await checking against the official text, several countries important to Indonesian workers are not yet covered, and some of my coding choices are certainly open to debate.

I therefore invite officials, legal aid institutes, SBMI, Migrant CARE, local organizations, lecturers, students, and former migrant workers and their families to help improve them, by sending laws and decisions, checking entries, or simply telling us whether these pages help. Every contribution is credited by name and every correction is logged openly. Suggestions can be sent to secretariat@theimr.org.

If justice for migrant workers is indeed sought through relationships, then humane law is law that reaches the hands of those intermediaries, clear enough to be retold on the front porch of a home.

Pranoto Iskandar
Founding Director, Institute for Migrant Rights