Legal Politics Of Criminal Responsibility In Reform Policy

Abstract

Law Number 1 of 1946 established the Criminal Code (KUHP), which was once a translation of Wetboek van Strafrecht and will remain in effect until the end of 2022 with all of its changes. The fundamental ideal that the entire Indonesian people strives for—liberation from all notions of colonialism—is carried out through the dialectical process of the Criminal Code in legislative actions for 60 (sixty) years. Therefore, the adoption of Law Number 1 of 2023 respecting the Criminal Code expresses the concepts of decolonization, recodification, democratization of criminal law, and adaptive harmonization. This study focuses on the legal politics of criminal responsibility from the standpoint of national criminal law reform. It seeks to address the following issues: (1) What is the legal politics of criminal responsibility in current positive criminal law?; and (2) What is the criminal responsibility law's political reform policy at the national level? This study compares criminal culpability under the old and new Criminal Codes using a comparative approach and a juridical-normative approach as its primary methodology. The primary focus of this study is secondary data, which encompasses both primary and secondary legal resources. Qualitative analysis techniques were used to analyze the data in the interim. The study's findings demonstrate that the fundamental tenet of criminal law reform—the principle of balance—is a fresh approach to the legal politics of criminal responsibility in the context of national criminal law reform. This approach is motivated by the Pancasila balance values, which are defined as Godly, Human, and Community values.