The TNI Law Passed in March 2025. The KUHAP Took Effect in January. The Permit Window Closed in Between.
Indonesian students lost the TNI Law fight in March 2025. The KUHAP that entered force this January carries the next round, and the streets are harder to access now.
The coalition that filled Patung Kuda on 19 and 20 March 2025, the one that tried to stop the RUU TNI revisions, watched the DPR pass the law anyway on 20 March, expanding the list of civilian state institutions where active-duty officers may serve. That fight was lost in the chamber even as it was being waged on the street.
The follow-on arrived quieter. Law No. 20 of 2025, the new Criminal Procedure Code, was passed by the DPR last year and entered into force on 2 January 2026 alongside the new Criminal Code. Human rights organizations have flagged the enacted KUHAP for arbitrary detention provisions, expanded surveillance authority, and investigative powers that sit largely outside meaningful judicial check.
Two laws, one direction
Read together, the TNI Law and the KUHAP move authority in the same direction: more officers inside more institutions, and more room for investigators to detain and surveil with thinner review. The student coalitions that mobilized in March 2025 are now organizing under a procedural code that took effect while most of the country was still on New Year holiday.
The timing is the political fact. A defense-policy fight draws crowds because the symbolism is legible. A procedural code rewrite moves through committee while the campus calendar is on break, and by the time the semester starts the law is already in the gazette.
The permit window
Coalitions trying to mobilize this July are running into the same enforcement environment that has shaped Indonesian assembly since the ITE Law era. Indonesia's 1998 freedom-of-assembly framework treats notification as the standard, yet in practice organizers describe a process in which the tanda terima becomes a gatekeeping document rather than a receipt.
Without it, buses get turned at the tol gates, sound permits get pulled, and the riot units are staged before the route is filed. A coalition that cannot legally assemble cannot put numbers in front of Senayan, and numbers were the only lever that ever bent the timetable.
Why the rewrite matters past Jakarta
KUHAP is the criminal procedure code. It governs how police arrest, how prosecutors charge, how long someone sits before a judge sees the paperwork. The next time a labor organizer in Bekasi or a fisherfolk leader in North Maluku gets picked up near a strategic project, the procedural questions, how long detention can run, what counts as evidence, who reviews it, are answered by a code that took effect six months ago.
Indonesian civil society has watched this pattern before, with the ITE Law, with the Omnibus revisions, with the 2022 Criminal Code that quietly criminalized insulting state institutions. A draft gets parked, the public moves on, and the contested clauses come back inside a bill no one was watching.
What losing twice looks like
Indonesian students learned in March 2025 that mass presence in front of Senayan does not always move the vote inside it. The TNI Law passed while the tear gas was still in the air. The KUHAP that frames how the next arrest will be processed is now enacted, the permit desk is harder to reach than it was last year, and the coalition is being asked to organize against a code that is already the law of the land.
