The Legality of Adat Criminal Law in Modern Indonesia (book review)

Title :- The Legality of Adat Criminal Law in Modern Indonesia.

By :- Roelof Haverman

Published :-PT. Tatanusa, Jakarta (2002), Hard back (100 pages)

Outline :- An excellent review of a most interesting aspect of human culture – reflecting the development when ethnic communities are slowly converted into the larger groups higher civilizations. Adat law was recorded, recognized and formalized in the Dutch colonial era as a way of working with simple communities. Difficulties arise and are discussed, for example when a person has been tried under village law, and may or may not be tried under National law (as they have already been tried !).

Some interesting excerpts ;

• This book will focus on adat law as a system of substantive rules that vary from time to time and from place to place, and are not codified according to the rules of legislation. Anyway that is what the new article in the proposed new Criminal Code is about – behavior that is punishable, even if not defined in legal regulation.
• The native system of justice was not applicable to Europeans, for whom the state administration of justice applied. In fact what it amounts to is that for the native community, adat criminal law was the rule within the native administration..”
• ..the general result of the 1945 – 49 period was that native justice in all territories ..was replaced by state administration except at the level of the village where local laws such as village adats were specifically allowed to continue.
• Hooker describes village justice as a system of voluntary mediation under which villages submit disputes to some form of indigenous form of settlement process.