Legal Literacy - Human rights are essentially markers of the limits of power. It is present not to prevent the state from working, but to ensure that power is exercised without damaging human dignity. In the framework of the rule of law, human rights function as a normative fence that limits the extent to which the state can act against its citizens, no matter how noble the goals claimed in the name of order, security or national stability. The Indonesian Constitution explicitly affirms this guarantee, placing respect, protection and fulfillment of human rights as the state's obligation. However, the dynamics of criminal law reform through the enactment of the new Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code actually show the opposite symptom, when human rights are no longer positioned as a basic principle, but as a variable that can be negotiated.

The Intersection of the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code

The intersection between the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code forms a criminal law landscape that has the potential to shift the function of law from a limitation of power to a means of legitimizing that power itself. In the new Criminal Procedure Code, the expansion of the discretion of law enforcement officials at the investigation stage is the most obvious example. The provision that gives investigators the authority, on the orders of investigators,…