Business and Human Rights in Indonesia’s Nickel Industrialization: Legal Accountability at Weda Bay Industrial Park

Husen Alting, Siti Barora, Nam Rumkel, Moatasem el-Gheriani

Abstract


Indonesia’s nickel downstreaming policy has produced large integrated industrial estates, of which the Weda Bay Industrial Park in Central Halmahera is the most prominent, yet the legal duties owed to the communities beside such estates remain dispersed across mining, environmental, industrial-estate, coastal, corporate, and human rights statutes administered by different authorities. This article asks how Indonesian law allocates and enforces duties to protect environmental and human rights in nickel industrial estates, and how far community-level evidence can discharge the evidentiary requirements of those duties. The study uses normative legal research combining statutory, conceptual, case, and comparative approaches, supported by a survey of 250 residents of Lelilef, Sagea, and Kobe analyzed through partial least squares structural equation modeling. Protection proves normatively available but institutionally indeterminate: licensing centralization under Law No. 3 of 2020 and the Job Creation Law separated permitting from field supervision; the narrowing of public involvement and the deletion of the no-fault wording from strict liability weakened two principal accountability routes; social and environmental responsibility is substituted for human rights due diligence; and consent has no statutory procedure comparable to that of the Philippines. Perception evidence corroborates salience, environmental quality being the strongest correlate of public assessment, but cannot establish breach. The article recommends anchoring due diligence in the licensing instruments, restoring the no-fault formula with express joint responsibility for estate operators, enacting a certified consent procedure, establishing a joint central and provincial supervisory unit with mandatory publication of inspection results, and recognizing a layered grievance architecture.

Keywords


Business and Human Rights; Environmental Approval; Free, Prior and Informed Consent; Mining Law; Nickel Downstreaming

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.33756/jlr.v1i2.36244

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