The Complementarity–Restorative Justice (C–RJ) Model: Reconstructing Indonesia’s Criminal Justice System Under The 2023 Criminal Code

This study constructs the Complementarity–Restorative Justice (C–RJ) Model as a framework for reconstructing Indonesia’s criminal justice system following the enactment of Law No. 1 of 2023 on the Criminal Code. Using a normative legal methodology combining statutory, conceptual, comparative, and historical approaches, along with official secondary data from the Ministry of Immigration and Corrections, this study analyzes of prison overcrowding, fragmented restorative justice regulation, and the living law controversy. The findings demonstrate that all three crises share a single root cause: the absence of a coherent architecture integrating state law, community law, and restorative mechanisms. This study concludsesthat the international complementarity principle can be transposed into “domestic complementarity” as a governing principle for inter-layer legal system relations. The resulting C–RJ Model operates through four tiered stages (pre-trial, trial, post-sentence, and retributive exclusion zone), offering an operational framework to enhance legal certainty and strengthen victim-oriented justice.