Environmental Criminal Law Policy from the Perspective of Green Criminology in Indonesia

Abstract

Indonesia's environmental criminal law continues to rely on an anthropocentric framework that treats state authority and human economic interest as the primary legal subjects, while ecological harm itself remains under-recognized as an object of legal protection. This normative-juridical research examines the policy of environmental criminal law in Indonesia through the lens of green criminology, focusing on the regulatory shift introduced by the Job Creation Law (Law No. 11 of 2020, later reenacted as Law No. 6 of 2023), which converted several criminal provisions under Law No. 32 of 2009 on Environmental Protection and Management into administrative sanctions. Using statute, conceptual, and case approaches, this study analyzes primary and secondary legal materials, including five illustrative court decisions on illegal mining, illegal logging, and industrial pollution decided between 2020 and 2025. The findings indicate that the post-Job Creation Law regime weakens criminal deterrence against corporate environmental offenders, that corporate criminal liability remains inconsistently applied in judicial practice, and that green criminology's concepts of state-corporate crime and ecological justice expose structural gaps left unaddressed by the current framework. The article concludes that Indonesia's environmental criminal policy requires recalibration toward a green-criminology-informed model that reinstates criminal sanction as a genuine deterrent for serious and repeated corporate environmental harm, strengthens post-judgment execution, and integrates restorative and ecological justice principles.