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 constitutes a foundation of modern criminal law by ensuring legal certainty, constraining state power, and protecting individuals from arbitrary criminalization and punishment. Nevertheless, its rigidly formalistic application often reduces law to written legislation and overlooks customary norms that remain recognized and operational within plural communities. Customary law, however, embodies restorative values, including deliberation, reparation, reconciliation, social responsibility, and offender reintegration. This study examines how customary legal values may be incorporated into the criminal justice system through a reconstruction of the principle of legality without undermining legal certainty, human rights protection, fair-trial guarantees, or state responsibility for criminal law enforcement. It employs normative legal research supported by statutory, conceptual, comparative, and socio-legal approaches. The legal materials comprise constitutions, legislation, judicial decisions, human rights instruments, policy documents, and scholarly literature on legal pluralism, restorative justice, and legal decolonization. These materials are qualitatively examined through systematic, historical, teleological, and constitutional interpretation. The findings demonstrate that customary law should not be incorporated through the automatic recognition of all traditional norms. Instead, its integration must be subject to a meaningfulness test assessing social legitimacy, normative clarity, restorative orientation, participatory procedures, protection of vulnerable groups, proportionality, accountability, and conformity with constitutional and human rights standards. Norms satisfying these criteria may be incorporated through a multilayered model encompassing substantive, procedural, institutional, and supervisory dimensions. This study concludes that reconstructing legality does not entail abandoning it, but rather developing an inclusive conception that reconciles legal certainty, legal pluralism, restorative justice, and human rights protection.

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