INDONESIAN CONSTITUTIONAL COURT DECISIONS AS A SOCIAL ENGINEER IN IMPROVING PEOPLE’S WELFARE

(Paper published in Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Recent Innovations (ICRI, 2018), pages 165-170)

Abstract

One of the national goals of the establishment of the Indonesian state is to improve the people’s welfare. To support this achievement, the law comes to bring its functions as a social engineer. It means the law plays a role in influencing the occurrence of a social change in a planned manner to achieve prosperity. The Constitutional Court decision is one of the sources of law that is expected to improve people’s welfare. This article aims to analyze the Constitutional Court decisions that have significant implications for maintaining and improving the people’s welfare in Indonesia. The methodology used in this research is a normative juridical with library research and case study approaches on decisions declared by the Constitutional Court in the last five years (2013-2018). This study found that there are socioeconomic rights of citizens that have been protected and restored by the Constitutional Court. These erga omnes decisions indirectly contributed to the improvement of the people’s welfare, in particular regarding the rights of a pension fund, a minimum wage and severance pay. This article concludes that an effort to maintain and improve the people’s welfare in Indonesia can also be enforced effectively through a social engineering based on the Constitutional Court decisions.

Keywords: Constitutional Court, People’s Welfare, Social Engineering, Socio-Economic RIghts

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