TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Indonesia's House of Representatives, or DPR, ratified the Criminal Code Bill, known as RKUHP, at a plenary meeting on Tuesday, December 6, 2022.

The approval was carried out amid a wave of rejection by several masses. Despite being met with protests, the RKUHP has a long history before its ratification.

The concept of the RKUHP is more than 50 years old

Based on Tempo data, the idea of forming a National Criminal Code emerged more than half a century ago during the First National Law Seminar in Semarang in 1963.

The main reason for the formulation of the RKUHP at that time was because the then Criminal Code was a derivative of the colonial government, consisting of several articles considered to have preferences for the interests of the colonials.

Moreover, the 1963 seminar also gathered several inputs to form the first Indonesian Criminal Code to expand several criminal offenses, especially those related to state security, economy, and decency.

Therefore, at the time, the Criminal Code was still sourced from law shaped by the Dutch, Wetboek van Strafrecht voor Nederlandsch-Indië. The law was passed for the first time through the Staatsblad or a kind of official regulation Number 732 of 1915 and came into effect in the Dutch East Indies on January 1, 1918.

RKUHP team formation

From the results of the First National Law Seminar in 1963, the government formed a team to develop the RKUHP in the 1970s or 1980s.

Initially, the team was known by a legal expert from Diponegoro University, Prof. Soedarto. The members were Prof. Roeslan Saleh from Gadjah Mada University, Prof. Moeljanto, Prof. Satochid Kartanegara, Prof. Oemar Seno Adji from the University of Indonesia, and J.E. Sahetapy from Airlangga University.

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As the year turned, the RKUHP team also encountered additions and replacements of members. For example, in 1986, when Prof. Soedarto died, he was soon replaced by Roeslan Saleh.

At that time, the team for the RKUHP agreed not to construct the Criminal Code from scratch, but to re-codify it from the Dutch East Indies Criminal Code. During this journey, Soedarto also asked for the opinion of two of his colleagues from Leiden University, namely Prof. D. Schaffmeister and Prof. N. Keijzer.

Dynamics of RKUHP Formulation

After the RKUHP was formulated more than 30 years since 1963, it was only at the end of 1993 that the head of the RKUHP team at that time, Mardjono Reksodiputro, gave the complete draft of the RKUHP to the government or the Minister of Justice at the time, Ismail Saleh.

However, when Ismail stepped down from his position and was replaced by Oetojo Oesman, it was said that the formulation of RKUHP had not made any progress. In other words, it was suspended, and until 2013, the DPR started discussing the RKUHP intensively.

On June 5, 2015, President Joko Widodo issued a Presidential Letter regarding the readiness of the government to discuss the RKUHP. In that letter, the government agreed that the discussion will take two years or it would complete in 2017. However, the RKUHP was finally approved by the government in 2022, or 7 years later.

If the First National Law Seminar in Semarang in 1963 is counted as the start of the formulation of the RKUHP, then this product of law can be said to be the longest-running law in Indonesian history, more than half a century.

Achmad Hanif Imaduddin | Translator: Intern / Imaji Lasahido

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