The Implementation of the Right to Education in Indonesia
This article discusses the implementation of the right to education in Indonesia. It uses human rights and historical approaches. Human rights approach is used to describe international human rights instruments on the guarantee of the right to education that is applied universally. This approach is also dealing with international human rights instrument on the right to education that has been ratified by Indonesia as well as national regulation instruments on the right to education applied in Indonesia. Historical approach highlights the role of Indonesian governments in education sector after the Independence Day, especially regarding the implementation of the right to education. The discussion focuses on the development that has been achieved and the difficulty that has been faced in the implementation of the right to education. Despite there have been significant progresses achieved in implementing the right to education, the Indonesian governments remain facing the difficulty to fulfil the right to education for the entire of Indonesian citizens. However, in the middle of such a difficulty, it raises a creative idea and concrete action from civil society in terms of providing education service for marginalized and indigenous peoples.
The Constitutionalization of Budget for Education and Its Judicial Enforcement in Indonesia
The introduction of provision concerning budget allocation for education in the amended constitution is not a common method in constitutional drafting in Indonesia. This article aims to understanding the background of the inclusion of this provision and its judicial enforcement. It argues that the establishment of this provision closely related to the fact that education was not properly funded. As a result, the quality of education was negatively affected. The constitutionalisation of budget for education opens the possibility to allocate the national budget in this field in a more sustainable way. In addition, by constitutionalizing budget for education, there is a legal avenue available to challenge the government policy if the government fails to fulfill its constitutional obligation. The newly established Constitutional Court has the power to review whether the allocation of national budget for education is consistent with the Constitution. In some judicial review cases on budget for education, the Court took legal approach and also extralegal factors in its rulings.
Colonialism and Human Rights, A Contradiction in Terms? The Case of France and West Africa, 1895–1914
ANY HISTORIAN IN THE FIELD OF modern European or American history sooner or later must confront one of the fundamental paradoxes of the last century: the acquisition and rule by force of colonies by the most advanced democracies, the United States, France, and Great Britain. Whatever the official claims, Western colonization during this period was in large part an act of state-sanctioned violence. On the crudest level, liberal regimes forcibly "pacified" native peoples who resisted colonization. On a more subtle level, their rule rested on a set of coercive practices that violated their own democratic values. Colonized persons were designated as subjects, not citizens. They had duties but few rights. In neither case, however, did the conquerors in question seem aware of any contradiction between their democratic institutions and the violent acquisition of overseas colonies. As even those among us who are only tangentially interested in the study of imperialism can attest, the faith of yesterday's empire builders in the moral legitimacy of their enterprise was all but absolute. In this essay, I would like to revisit the issue of Western belief in the moral legitimacy of overseas expansion, through an examination of how one modern democracy-France under the early Third Republic (1870-1914)-rationalized imperialism, both rhetorically and in practice, at the high-water mark of late nineteenth-century liberalism. In particular, this article provides an overview of the actions and ideas of a specific group of colonial administrators-the governors general of the French West African Federation, headquartered in Dakar, Senegalfrom the founding of the federation in 1895 to the advent of World War J.1 It is, of