No Concessions: The Life of Yap Thiam Hien, Indonesian Human Rights Lawyer

by Daniel S. Lev, Benedict Anderson (Introduction)

The compelling personal story of human rights lawyer Yap Thiam Hien (1913-1989) brings decades of modern Indonesian history to life. No Concessions is a penetrating analysis of the trajectory of the Chinese minority in Indonesia over close to a century and the remarkable making of a civic leader. Without abandoning his ethnic roots, Yap transcended them by becoming a courageous legal defender of civil and human rights of all oppressed Indonesians, including former communists and radical Muslims. Daniel S. Lev (1931-2006) was professor of political science at the University of Washington. Among his publications are Legal Evolution and Political Authority in Selected Essays; Islamic Courts in A Study in the Political Bases of Legal Institutions; The Transition to Guided Indonesian Politics, 1957-1959 , and, as coeditor, Making Indonesia.

466 pages, Hardcover

First published November 8, 2011

Reviews

[Silvio Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yap Thian Hiem was born in a Chinese Indonesian family in Aceh, the northern part of Sumatra, and educated on Java. He became a teacher at first, then eventually went back to school to study law, had an uneventful office job under the Japanese occupation in World War II, and finished his studies in the Netherlands before starting his law career in earnest. He first got involved in public life within his church (he'd become a Protestant Christian while studying law on Java), then as part of Baperki, the Chinese Indonesian association that, much to Yap's outrage, developed into a political group loyal to the left-leaning autocratic president Sukarno and with connections to the Indonesian Communist Party. Yap was part of the Constituent Assembly in the late 1950s which came to nothing when Sukarno overrode it, but he wasn't widely known. In the last years of Sukarno's "Guided Democracy" he started to take cases that he could use to expose the shameless corruption and disregard for legal process in the court system. Then came the coup of 1965 that replaced Guided Democracy with the murderously anti-communist New Order regime led by the army under Suharto. Yap very reluctantly agreed to represent Sukarno's unpopular second in command, Subandrio, in what everyone knew was a sham trial. He lost the case - Subandrio was sentenced to death but never actually killed - but it made Yap famous. From then until he died in 1989, he continued to defend clients who had been accused for a wide variety of reasons, with the common factor Yap's persistence in calling out the prosecution's disregard for the rules that they were supposed to work within. It's not clear whether that approach actually had any long-term results, and the short-term results for Yap's clients were mixed, but it won the admiration of a lot of people. One of them, a scholar from the United States who was Yap's personal friend in his last decades, wrote this book. Because the author died while writing it the coverage is mostly of Yap's formative years and gets patchy for the famous period.