Legal Mobilisation by Women with Disabilities in Indonesia

Women with disabilities have experienced double marginalisation. As women, they remain marginalised by patriarchal culture and religious conservatism, and as persons with disabilities, their participation in social, political, economic, and cultural life has been constrained by the state and society’s barriers. Even though Indonesia has ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the marginalisation of women with disabilities remains an important issue. In this context, by applying a qualitative method, this article addresses the question of how women with disabilities mobilise existing legal and institutional resources to pursue empowerment. It finds that in the process of legal mobilisation, they employ three different strategies: advocacy from above, advocacy from within, and advocacy from below, through which a better condition has been achieved but the challenges for further empowerment remain in place.