Mencari Penerang Menuju Jalan Pulang

As a form of punishment, the death penalty in Indonesia was not in fact introduced by the Dutch East Indies government. Long before the arrival of European colonial powers, kings and sultans throughout the Indonesian archipelago had already practiced capital punishment against their subjects. In the Indonesian context, the comprehensive consolidation of the death penalty took place in 1808 under the order of Governor-General Herman Willem Daendels, who regulated the imposition of capital punishment as part of the authority of the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. During this period, the death penalty was maintained as a strategy to suppress resistance among the colonized population and as an effort to defend Java from British attacks. Without attempts to pacify the colonized population through the instrument of capital punishment, the mission of the French government—which then held power in the Netherlands—to defend Java from British invasion would have been difficult to realize. It is therefore unsurprising that the practice of the death penalty represented an embodiment of law as an instrument of power, aimed at enforcing public compliance, a phenomenon commonly found in colonial contexts. After Indonesia’s independence, the death penalty was also retained in a number of regulations as a means of power control within legal instruments, particularly in relation to its supposed deterrent effect, which ultimately proves to be merely apparent and illusory.

This anomaly has, of course, drawn serious attention from a number of human rights activists and from other countries that have abandoned practices considered incompatible with basic humanitarian values. This concern is further reinforced by United Nations Resolution No. 29 of 18 December 2007, which calls on all states to implement a moratorium on the use of the death penalty within their legal systems as a step toward its abolition.