Criminal Law Policy On Animal Abuse From An Animal Rights Perspective

Violence against animals is a phenomenon that is receiving increasing attention in modern law, as awareness grows that animals are living beings capable of experiencing suffering. However, criminal law policy in Indonesia remains dominated by an anthropocentric paradigm that treats animals as objects of human ownership, rather than as legal subjects with intrinsic rights. This study aims to analyze Indonesia’s criminal law policy in regulating and enforcing legal norms regarding animal cruelty from the perspective of animal rights. The research method employed is normative legal research using legislative, conceptual, and theoretical approaches. The results of the study indicate that the criminal provisions in Article 302 of the old Criminal Code and Article 337 of Law No. 1 of 2023 on the new Criminal Code, as well as sectoral regulations such as Law No. 41 of 2014 on Animal Husbandry and Animal Health, remain administrative in nature and have not provided substantive protection for animals’ rights as moral subjects. Indonesia’s criminal legal policy has not explicitly adopted the paradigm of ecological justice and animal rights, resulting in weak enforcement against perpetrators of animal cruelty that fails to deter such acts. Therefore, this study recommends the need for a reconstruction of criminal law policy through the enactment of a special law on animal protection and animal rights, the reformulation of more responsive criminal norms, and the integration of the ecological justice paradigm to realize a criminal justice system that is just for both humans and non-human living beings.