Students of Faculty of Law of Universitas Muhammadiyah Yogyakarta (UMY) participated in a National Law Student Competition 2017 organized by Student Executive Board of Faculty of Law of University of Airlangga (BEM UNAIR) on Thursday-Tuesday (17-19/11). They were M. Reza Fathari (batch 2014), Tiara Rizky Andespa (batch 2016) and Maiza Dea Nuraini (batch 2016). They, associated in of the Community of Legal Research and Social Studies (CLaSS) of UMY presented their paper entitled “The Concept of Employment Access Rights for the Disabled: Education, Empowerment, and Encouragement.”

The team leader M. Reza expressed his gratitude for being able to present a paper in a national conference. “Alhamdulillah, we could represent UMY. Basically, joining a conference enables us to discuss and explore our topic so that we can do our best during the presentation,” he stated.

Reza informed that the team’s paper was included in top 11 of 30 submitted papers from various universities in Indonesia.

Reza told that his paper should be in line with the theme of ‘Constitutionalism and Human Rights: A Conception of Responsibility in the Indonesian State System’. “I analyzed an issues which government has not resolved yet. Government seems to have less concern of employment access rights for the disabled even though the issue is mentioned on Law No. 8/2016 on the Disabled that the number of employees of each private company and government institution should be 1 and 2 percent respectively. In fact, government has not established the law well that many companies are not punished yet when they do not applied the regulation,” he declared.

Besides, Reza conveyed that there are a lot of resolutions to change people’s stereotype of the disabled. “Our team attempted to propose an innovative solution called a 3E conception, namely Education, Empowerment, and Encouragement for the disabled,” he maintained.

Reza expected that the idea could motivate other students to think critically to solve social issues and to join both regional and national competitions. “Students should possess high sensitivity towards issues emerging around them and could write and as well as present papers in national and international conferences,” he said.