Constitutional Limits to Omnibus Legislation: Indonesia, Germany, and the Protection of Essential Rights

Abstract

The growing use of omnibus legislation reflects governments’ efforts to accelerate regulatory reform and overcome statutory fragmentation. However, when this technique alters legal regimes governing constitutionally protected rights, legislative efficiency may conflict with deliberative legitimacy, legal clarity, and substantive rights protection. This article examines the constitutional limits of omnibus legislation through a comparative study of Indonesia and Germany. It employs a normative legal method combining statutory, constitutional, conceptual, and functional comparative approaches. The comparison evaluates both jurisdictions through common variables: legislative structure, rights protection, legal definiteness, public deliberation, proportionality, and constitutional review. The study finds that Indonesia’s Job Creation framework has primarily generated constitutional scrutiny concerning legislative procedure, transparency, and meaningful public participation, while its substantive effects on environmental, land, and socio-economic rights remain insufficiently addressed through a coherent constitutional standard. Germany, although not formally recognising omnibus legislation as a distinct category, controls complex and multi-subject legislation through the Rechtsstaat principle, legal definiteness, proportionality, federal deliberation, and rights-based judicial review. Based on these findings, the article develops the Essential Rights Exclusion Principle, under which omnibus legislation directly altering the scope, protection, enforceability, or institutional safeguards of essential constitutional rights must be excluded from ordinary legislative consolidation unless supported by heightened deliberation, rights-specific justification, and intensified judicial scrutiny. The principle provides a structured constitutional standard for reconciling regulatory efficiency with democratic accountability and the protection of essential rights.