Indonesia

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of Leiden University’s Faculty of Law with Gadjah Mada University.

Project summary

The goal of this project is to develop an innovative form of international cooperation in academic education between the law faculties of Gadjah Mada University (UGM) and Leiden University. It builds on a long history of cooperation in legal development and education between these partners.

In particular, the project aims to:

1. Enable staff from both partners to participate in and study each other’s teaching;

2. Enable law students from UGM to take courses at Leiden University and continue with an internship;

3. Offer exchange students extra supervision, helping them to contextualise the courses they follow, engage in legal comparison and build a network.

The project supports the regional focus on Indonesia in the internationalisation policies of Leiden University. Furthermore, it contributes to the policy of promoting an ‘international classroom’, a more international student body, and having staff from other regions teach in Leiden.

For UGM the programme is important in reinforcing its international profile and enabling its students to gain experience abroad, in line with Indonesian national education policy. UGM is one of Indonesia’s centers of socio-legal studies and keen to cooperate with Leiden Law Faculty’s Van Vollenhoven Institute and its Master programme in Law and Society.

This project enables staff exchange for cooperation on innovating legal education about customary law. The challenge is to make legal education more relevant for graduates who will work in contexts of legal pluralism, aiming for social justice and providing legal services that common citizens need. Read more about this cooperation.

In May/June 2024, Herlambang Wiratraman from UGM was in Leiden for this project. During a seminar co-organised by VVI and KITLV he reflected on the importance of good legal education for the protection of press freedom. Ten years ago, when Herlambang defended his thesis in Leiden on this topic, there were high hopes that democracy, as well as press freedom, would be stronger and protected in the early days of President Jokowi’s administration.

In this seminar he reflected on changes during the past decade, explaining why he had to reconsider some of his dissertation conclusions. Read more about his project.

The impact on a broader scale was one of the topics that Herlambang Wiratraman enphasized during his key note speech for the WINNER conference in September 2024. Addressing why it is important to cherish the bilateral collaboration between VVI at Leiden Law School and Indonesian Law Faculties, he mentioned:

• Both countries can benefit from shared knowledge, resources, and expertise, leading to mutual growth and development;
• Collaborative innovation to solve problems and create new opportunities (no language barrier; existing networks with NGOs and local universities adds to the valorisation of research results/publications);
• Building trust and understanding for more resilient partnerships (open to talk about important topics like decolonisation, democracy, and human rights);
• Addressing global impact, significant advancements in areas like rule of law and social justice, technology, health care, and environmental sustainability.