The fix that could stop police and prosecutors fighting was left out of the law

The fight between Indonesia's police and its prosecutors is older than the scandal that made it visible. Writing for Indonesia at Melbourne, legal scholar Dio Ashar Wicaksana traces it back to the 1981 criminal procedure code, known as KUHAP. That law set up what lawyers call functional differentiation: the police alone investigate, and prosecutors are barred from stepping into a police investigation. Nobody was put above both to referee.

The case of Febrie Adriansyah shows what happens without a referee. Police raided the former deputy attorney general's home in early July and charged him with corruption and money laundering. President Prabowo then approved moving the case over to prosecutors. Wicaksana calls that step legally problematic, because police can hand a case to prosecutors only after they declare their own investigation complete. So the dispute went up to the president rather than to a court, which is exactly the pattern he is describing.

Reformers had a specific answer for this, and it was dropped. The 2025 revision of KUHAP did widen judicial oversight of some coercive measures, meaning things like arrest and seizure that take away a person's freedom or property. But it left out the Preliminary Examining Judge, or HPP: a judge who would look at a case from the moment someone is named a suspect and ask whether there is enough early evidence to justify going further. Indonesia's weakest score in the global rule of law index has consistently been criminal justice, and Wicaksana argues the country keeps choosing surface calm between its institutions over real accountability.

Why it matters

If police name you a suspect, no judge tests whether the evidence behind that decision is real until far later in the process, and that gap is where pressure, delay and bargaining live. Business owners and anyone facing an investigation carry the risk directly. Watch whether parliament goes back to the missing judge, because until it does, each new scandal will be sorted out between the police, the prosecutors and the palace instead of in open court.