Digital Rights Advocacy and Victim Protection in Cybercrime Law Enforcement in Indonesia

The need to protect victims of cybercrime and the need to preserve freedom of expression are two legal interests that must be balanced in Indonesia's digital criminal justice system. The present study examines how Indonesian law deals with this balance and proposes a rights-based advocacy framework. To do this, this study employs normative legal research to analyze the ITE Law, the Criminal Code, and the Personal Data Protection Law, alongside the decisions of the Constitutional Court and relevant human rights standards, Statutory, conceptual, and case study approaches are applied based on the principles of legality, victim protection, necessity, and proportionality. The analysis shows two normative shortcomings: the mechanisms of criminal law do not consistently take account of victim recovery, and the legal distinction between harmful digital behavior and protected public-interest expression is not sufficiently clear. On the basis of this normative analysis, the study establishes the Rights-Balancing Structural Advocacy (RBSA) Model. The innovation of this model is that it combines victim-centered protection with safeguards against over-criminalization in a single structural advocacy mechanism comprising four stages: rights-based screening, proportionality assessment, dual-track advocacy and structural correction. Unlike case-by-case advocacy, RBSA links victim protection and recovery with limits on excessive criminal intervention and with the correction of persistent regulatory and institutional inconsistencies. Its conceptual contribution is thus a normative-operational framework that shifts digital-rights advocacy from being a response to individual cases to becoming a mechanism for protecting rights and promoting structural reform within Indonesia's digital criminal justice governance.