Revised Criminal Code Approval Takes More than 5 Decades
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17 December 2022 23:51 WIB
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.
