Background

The field reality rejects textual optimism. Through HuMaWin, HuMa recorded 382 cases of agrarian conflicts and natural resources (HuMa, 2025). In HuMa’s documentation, corporations and ministries in charge of forestry are the most dominant conflict actors (HuMa, 2025). Indigenous communities face off against state and capital alliances, not just administrative disputes.

Faced with this reality, the recognition regime works slowly and is divided on eleven paths (HuMa, 2024). In the forestry path, Constitutional Court Decision Number 35/PUU-X/2012 emphasizes that customary forests are not state forests, but forests within the indigenous legal community’s territory. The state has been gradually designating customary forests since 2016, but slowly, and even after designation, indigenous legal communities often cannot enjoy their traditional rights due to unresolved conflicts with other parties (HuMa, 2019). In a separate land path, customary land is further hindered: indigenous legal communities must first be designated through regional regulations before their customary land can be registered (Ministerial Regulation ATR/BPN No. 14 of 2024), and customary rights cannot be exercised on land burdened by others’ rights (Government Regulation No. 18 of 2021). As a result, until 2024, only 24 certificates covering 850,000 hectares have been granted, receiving customary land designation in the form of HPL, which is not a recognition of rights but originates from state control. In this context, the Indigenous Peoples Rights Bill (RUU HAM) replaces Law Number 39 of 1999 (Article 128), with provisions for indigenous communities in Articles 63 to 65.

Analysis

Read socio-legally, law is not just text, but a social fact working in power relations (Wignjosoebroto, 2002). With this measure, this document fails in four interlocking knots.

First, empty definitions and absence of mechanisms. Article 1 defines sixteen terms, none of which are “indigenous communities,” “customary land,” and “traditional rights.” Article 64 grants rights without specifying who acknowledges them, through what procedure, and with what legal consequences. This void throws recognition back to the old conditional, layered, and sectoral regime (HuMa, 2024; HuMa, 2026), so legal recognition stops as a formal form without substantive protection (Simarmata, 2006). This is the recurring gap between text and context in the recognition of indigenous community rights (Wiratraman et al., 2010): rights are declared, while the means to acquire them are left vacant.

Second, normative subordination as regression. Law Number 39 of 1999 protects the cultural identity of indigenous legal communities, including rights to customary land, “in line with the times,” and imposes that obligation on law, society, and the Government (Article 6). The Indigenous Peoples Rights Bill removes that obligation through passive language, then replaces the earlier evolutionary clause with a subordinating clause, namely protected “as long as in accordance with the provisions of laws and regulations” (Article 65 paragraph (2)). This shift subordinates rights equivalent to human rights to sectoral laws, which are instruments of dispossession in themselves. Yet, indigenous communities are already recognized in the Constitution, Article 18B paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution. This subordination simultaneously reduces customary law and customary justice because by only mentioning “other traditional rights” to be “preserved and protected,” the Indigenous Peoples Rights Bill treats customary law as a frozen cultural heritage rather than a living law.

Third, stripped consent. Article 65 paragraph (