TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search results
Popular Reads
Top Results
No results found. Please check your search term and try again
Can't find what you're looking for?
View all search resultsThe Constitutional Court ruling that is (not) final and binding
The current polemic between the Constitutional Court and the National Police is a test of the state vis-à-vis the ethics of power.
Change text size
Gift Premium Articles
to Anyone
Share the best of The Jakarta Post with friends, family, or colleagues. As a subscriber, you can gift 3 to 5 articles each month that anyone can read—no subscription needed!
Law and enforcement: National Police chief Gen. Listyo Sigit Prabowo (right) addresses a press conference alongside Police Reform Acceleration Committee chairman and former Constitutional Court chief justice Jimly Asshiddiqie on Nov. 24, 2025 following an event at the National Police’s Mobile Brigade Training Center in Cikeas, Bogor, West Java. (Antara/Yulius Satria Wijaya)
T
he controversy surrounding the Constitutional Court’s decision to annul the mechanism of “secondment under the National Police chief”, as well as the subsequent Police Regulation (Perpol) No. 10/2025 that effectively revives the same mechanism, has left the public deeply confused. What citizens are witnessing is a dissonance in how the state speaks to, and hears, itself.
When the court speaks as the final boundary of power and state apparatuses respond with “administrative creativity”, what unfolds is not merely a difference in interpretation but a shift in how the state understands compliance.
The state does not openly defy the Constitution; it manages it. This is done not through overt resistance but through productive bureaucratic methods, in which the highest ruling is respected as text while it is weakened in practice. This is where the polemic becomes significant, not because of what is regulated but because of what is considered permissible to ignore without ever declaring rejection.
This is a political symptom of a state that has lost its unified moral voice. The state now speaks with two interpretations at once: a firm Constitutional Court and a flexible wielding of power. Both are legally valid within the bureaucratic sphere, yet precisely for that reason they have become confusing, and dangerous, for citizens.
On the one hand, the Constitutional Court has spoken in the highest language available to the republic: the language of the Constitution. Its rulings are not recommendations, let alone moral advice, but markers of limitation. They are imaginary boundaries defining how far power may extend. The decisions of the Constitutional Court are not meant to expand policy options but to close them. They are the state telling itself “enough”.
On the other hand, the National Police, guided by organizational logic and institutional assertiveness, have responded in the language of technocracy: internal regulations, administrative mechanisms, the term “secondment” and the logic of efficiency. This is the moment when law ceases to function as a fence and instead becomes a garden: one that can be circled, entered and quietly reshaped by those in power.
What is at stake is no longer a matter of correct articles, procedural validity or normative interpretation. The core issue is the political meaning of state action: how power responds to the limits imposed on itself, how constitutional authority is negotiated in practice and how these signals are received by the public.
