Beyond the Principle of Legality: Integrating Indigenous Legal Values into the Modern  Criminal Justice System

Julisa Aprilia Kaluku; Mohammad Fadli

doi:10.33756/eslaj.v8i2.40615

Beyond the Principle of Legality: Integrating Indigenous Legal Values into the Modern Criminal Justice System

Julisa Aprilia Kaluku, Mohammad Fadli

Abstract

The principle of legality has traditionally safeguarded legal certainty, constrained state coercion, and protected individuals from arbitrary criminalization and punishment. However, its strictly formal conception may insufficiently accommodate legal pluralism and customary law's normative authority. This article examines the integration of customary legal values into modern criminal justice while preserving constitutional supremacy, human rights, fair-trial guarantees, and legal certainty. It employs normative legal research using conceptual and statutory approaches, supported by socio-legal considerations. Primary and secondary legal materials are analyzed qualitatively through systematic, teleological, historical, and constitutional interpretation. The study distinguishes customary law as a source of criminalization from its role as a normative resource for resolving criminal cases. Criminal liability based on customary law requires accessibility, precision, foreseeability, territorial determinacy, and constitutional compatibility. Conversely, customary values may inform mediation, sentencing, victim restoration, reconciliation, and offender reintegration, subject to effective safeguards. Accordingly, this article proposes an inclusive legality model recognizing customary law conditionally, based on social legitimacy, normative clarity, participatory procedures, proportionality, protection of vulnerable groups, and state supervision. This multilayered framework integrates customary law through value-based, procedural, institutional, and supervisory dimensions. It concludes that legal pluralism can be accommodated within modern criminal justice without abandoning the protective foundations of legality.

Keywords

Principle of Legality; Customary Law; Criminal Justice System; Legal Pluralism; Restorative Justice.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.33756/eslaj.v8i2.40615