Boundary Witness Exclusion and Administrative Defect in Village-Issued Land Documents: An Empirical Legal Analysis of SKT/SKGR Issuance in Tambusai Timur, Indonesia

This study investigates the legal validity of Land Ownership Certificates (Surat Keterangan Tanah/SKT) and Compensation Certificates (Surat Keterangan Ganti Rugi/SKGR) issued without the involvement of boundary witnesses (saksi sempadan) at village level, focusing on the Tambusai Timur Village Office, Rokan Hulu Regency, Riau, Indonesia. Using an empirical juridical approach, primary data were collected through field interviews with the village head, the land transaction applicant (Sulaiman), and the boundary witness (Rizal), supplemented by statutory analysis and documentary review. The findings demonstrate that the issuance of SKT/SKGR without boundary witnesses is administratively valid as a village service product but fails to satisfy formal and material legal validity requirements. This practice contravenes the principles of agreement and good faith under Articles 1320 and 1338 of the Indonesian Civil Code, and is inconsistent with Article 18(1) of Government Regulation No 24 of 1997, which mandates the consent of adjacent landowners in boundary determination. Under Article 19 of the Basic Agrarian Law and Article 97 of Government Regulation No 18 of 2021, SKT/SKGR functions solely as an administrative indicator rather than strong evidence of land rights. Causative factors include factual field constraints, administrative pressure from applicants, and suboptimal invocation of alternative mechanisms under Article 37(1) of Ministerial Regulation on Agrarian Affairs No 3 of 1997 and Article 22(2) of Ministerial Regulation ATR/BPN No 6 of 2018. This study makes an original contribution to Indonesian agrarian scholarship by interrogating the administrative pre-stage of land registration at village level — a dimension previously neglected in the literature.