Strengthening Legal Skills for Peace Village Working Groups, Wahid Foundation Organize Women’s Access to Justice Training

Surabaya – Since 2017, Wahid Foundation has been running Peace Village Program in cooperation with UN Women in order to create peace within the society through the Women Participation for Inclusive Society (WISE) – GUYUB program, targeting 3 provinces: West Java (Bogor and Depok), Central Java (Solo) and East Java (Malang and Sumenep).

 The program is conducted to strengthen the implementation of Peace Village with prioritizing gender-responsive community mechanism to promote peaceful and gender-justice community.

Through the program, on Friday-Sunday, 2-4 April 2021, Wahid Foundation strengthen the capacity of each level of society, including women and youths included in the Working Group (Kelompok Kerja/Pokja) of Peace Village, to access to justice and women’s protection in the gender-responsive community to overcome violence extremism and to improve women’s rights by conducting the “Women’s Access to Justice for Working Group in East Java” workshop at Novotel Surabaya Hotel-Hotel and Suites.

 Mujtaba Hamdi, Wahid Foundation Executive Director in his welcoming speech mentioned that the training was a follow-up to the training conducted earlier, which is the “Prevention of Violence Extremism and Legal Literacy for Peace Village Working Groups” training that was conducted on 27-29 February in Surabaya. According to him, the purpose of conducting the two trainings, other than to strengthen each Pokja’s capacity, but also to provide deeper understanding on how to build and access more concrete justice scheme on the village level, which is through the national law framework regarding protection to women’s rights.

 “Through the operational/praxis of this training, we will be able to build the most concrete framework for the village: building a framework that allows access to justice that is available, which is the first national law framework related to protection of women’s rights,” said Mujtaba.

 Furthermore, Mujtaba explained that in the training the attendees were also given lesson on religious interpretation, specifically the importance of women’s empowerment and fulfillment of rights, diversity, and peace, so Pokja members are hoped to be able to participate in spreading peace with reference from Islamic peaceful ideology.

 Not only lesson on religious interpretation, the attendees from several Peace Village Pokjas were also given lesson and insight on paralegal and legal skills in accompanying and finding solution to societal issues, specifically violence and violation of children and women’s rights through formal current law mechanism, from family law to criminal law.

 Lastly, this training also gave lesson and skills to the Peace Village Pokjas as companion and defender of women’s rights in finding solutions to problem(s) or dispute(s) through informal law, such as consultation, negotiation, mediation and conciliation.

 The “Women’s Access to Justice for Working Group in East Java” training involved many attendees who are representatives from Peace Villages in Malang and Sumenep, which are Candirenggo Peace Village Pokja and Sidomulyo Malang District Peace Village Pokja, plus the representatives from Guluk-Guluk Village Pokja and Payundan Dundang Sumenep District Peace Village Pokja, East Java.