Borobudur Law and Society Journal

Corporations commit or enable much of the economic crime that harms the state and the public, yet Indonesian criminal law, which is built on the principle of fault, finds it hard to prove the mental state of a corporation that acts through layered management. This article asks whether strict liability is part of Indonesian corporate criminal liability, whether it can improve the prevention of economic crime, and how corporate liability should be reformulated. It is a normative legal study that uses statutory and conceptual approaches to Law No 1 of 2023 on the Criminal Code, Supreme Court Regulation No 13 of 2016, sectoral statutes on corruption, money laundering, competition and the environment, and the scholarly literature. The study finds that the Criminal Code permits strict liability only where a statute so provides, and that the sectoral provisions examined, apart from civil environmental liability, do not dispense with fault: they attribute liability to the corporation through benefit, policy, tolerance or failure to prevent, which is organisational fault. Evidence that strict liability itself deters economic crime is thin, and enforcement is hampered by fragmented norms, individual-centred proof and fine-only sanctions. The article proposes a compliance-based model of liability, with an explicit failure-to-prevent standard, a compliance defence, structural sanctions and harmonisation with the new procedural law.