Legal Mobilisation and Civil Society On the use and usefulness of strategic litigation in Southeast Asia

This chapter discusses the ways in which civil society organisations in Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand use litigation as a means to realise their aims. Synthesising studies on two fields of NGO activism - land conflicts and labour rights - we will explore how regularly NGOs in these countries make use of legal mobilisation strategies, how they employ them, and how effective these strategies have been. To this end, we couch our analysis in a brief comparative analysis of the ‘legal opportunity structure’ of these countries. We conclude that, while particularly Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines have legal frameworks of justiciable rights that are relatively conducive to legal mobilisation, civil society organisations are relatively reluctant to engage in litigation as a means to achieve their goals. When they turn to the court system, they mostly do so to seek redress for specific complaints or conflicts, while - apart from a few yet important examples - they rarely employ the legal system to achieve changes in governmental policies or laws. We observe that a vicious cycle is at work: because of the reluctance of NGOs to turn to the courts, the legal systems in the countries under study also face limited pressure to improve.