Borobudur Law and Society Journal

Indonesia has been bound by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights since 2005, yet its Code of Criminal Procedure of 1981 was written in a crime-control paradigm and was often criticised for protecting suspects only formally. That Code was repealed by Law No 20 of 2025, which has applied since 2 January 2026. This normative study asks how far the rights of suspects in the repealed and the new Code are harmonised with the fair trial guarantees of articles 9, 10 and 14 of the Covenant, and where harmonisation is still needed. It uses statutory, conceptual and comparative approaches to the Covenant, the General Comments of the Human Rights Committee, the 1981 Code, Law No 20 of 2025 and the secondary literature. The 1981 Code recognised most Covenant rights in form but limited mandatory counsel to serious or indigent cases, left detention to wide discretion and had no exclusionary rule. The 2025 Code narrows several gaps: it sets evidential thresholds for designation, arrest and detention, strengthens advocates and widens pretrial review. It keeps the old thresholds for assigned counsel, has broad detention grounds and gives limited protection against coerced statements. Implementing regulations and judicial practice should close these gaps.