National Moot Court Competition (NMCC) ALSA Piala Mahkamah Agung XXVI

Substantive criminal law defines which acts constitute crimes and what punishments attach to them. In Indonesia, the foundational instrument was long the Wetboek van Strafrecht voor Nederlandsch-Indië of 1915, carried over after independence through Law No. 1 of 1946 and renamed the Kitab Undang-Undang Hukum Pidana (KUHP). For decades, reform efforts sought to replace this colonial-era code with one reflecting Pancasila values, customary norms, and modern criminological thinking, while harmonising scattered special statutes on corruption, narcotics, terrorism, money laundering, and information and electronic transactions. That process culminated in Law No. 1 of 2023 on the Criminal Code, promulgated in January 2023 and scheduled to enter into force in January 2026. The new KUHP restructures general provisions on culpability, recognises corporate criminal liability, introduces alternatives to imprisonment such as community service and supervisory sentences, and codifies living law (hukum yang hidup dalam masyarakat). At the same time, it has drawn domestic and international criticism over provisions on insulting state institutions and the president, restrictions on demonstrations, defamation, cohabitation and extramarital sex, and the retention of the death penalty as a conditionally imposed sanction. The core debates today concern how to balance legal certainty, proportionality, and protection of fundamental rights; how to integrate adat (customary) offences without violating the principle of legality; how to treat corporations as criminal subjects; and how to align Indonesian criminal law with international obligations on human rights, transnational crime, and anti-corruption. These questions form fertile ground for moot court argumentation on doctrine, constitutional review, and comparative practice.

Indonesian criminal procedure is governed primarily by Law No. 8 of 1981, the Kitab Undang-Undang Hukum Acara Pidana (KUHAP), which replaced the colonial Herziene Inlandsch Reglement. The KUHAP introduced an integrated criminal justice system distributing authority among the police as investigators, the prosecution service as public prosecutors, the judiciary as adjudicators, and correctional institutions as executors of sentences. It established core safeguards such as the presumption of innocence, the right to counsel, limits on detention, and the pretrial (praperadilan) mechanism for testing the legality of arrest, detention, and the termination of investigations or prosecutions. Over four decades of practice have exposed structural strains. Constitutional Court rulings, notably Decision No. 21/PUU-XII/2014, expanded praperadilan jurisdiction to include the determination of suspect status, the legality of searches, and seizures, reshaping pretrial litigation. Special regimes for corruption (with the KPK), narcotics, terrorism, and money laundering have layered additional procedural rules onto the KUHAP, while digital evidence, electronic surveillance, asset recovery, and restorative justice approaches have outpaced the 1981 framework. The Supreme Court and Attorney General's Office have issued regulations on restorative justice and case management to fill gaps pending comprehensive reform. The draft Revised KUHAP under deliberation seeks to strengthen judicial oversight of coercive measures, introduce examining judges (hakim pemeriksa pendahuluan), regulate electronic evidence and remote hearings, and embed restorative justice. Contested questions include the scope of police investigative discretion, the role of advocates during interrogation, standards for admissibility of unlawfully obtained evidence, protection of witnesses and victims, and compatibility with the ICCPR fair-trial standards. These tensions provide rich material for moot court problems on legality, proportionality, and the rights of the accused.