The Relevance of the Doctrine on Restorative Justice in the Indonesian Sentencing System

Referring on the development of criminal law recently, it is inevitable to reform the criminal law through changes on the Indonesian Criminal Code (KUHP). Being derived from the foreign law (relic of the colonial era), the Criminal Code has been obsolete, injustice, outmoded and unrealistic irrelevant for the present reality. The type of research employed in this paper is normative research, reviewing the restorative justice principle from the perspective of the criminal law system, with the aim of constructing a restorative justice concept which is ideal to be applied in the Indonesian criminal law system. The concept of restorative justice is an approach of problem solving that emphasizes the recovery of victims and to restore the relationship between the perpetrator and the victim and to their respective communities. By using such approach, the parties are expected to reach a mutual agreement related to the settlement of disputes which expected to harmonize the relationship of the parties prior the occurrence of the crime. On the practical level, the principles on restorative justice for the settlement of criminal case may need to be implemented imminently as part of the criminal system in Indonesia