Legal Model for Post-Flood Ecological Disaster Recovery in North Sumatra, Indonesia

This paper examines how corruption and environmental crimes committed by PT Toba Pulp Lestari have produced flash floods, ecological disasters, and the extinction of villages in Tapanuli, North Sumatra. Drawing on normative juridical analysis and case study of legal documents, court decisions, and civil society reports, it traces three mechanisms of corporate-state crime: financial corruption through transfer pricing and asset depreciation, environmental crimes through deforestation of 67,000 hectares of customary forest, and criminalization of Indigenous land defenders under the Job Creation Law. The article shows how law has been instrumentalized against Indigenous claims, creating what Nancy Fraser terms ‘abnormal justice’. In response, it proposes a legal action model comprising revocation of TPL’s concession through administrative courts, actio popularis for ecosystem recovery, and ratification of the Indigenous Peoples Bill. The analysis contributes a socio-legal framework for contesting corporate-state crime in Indonesia.

Asset (computer security) · Criminalization · Deforestation (computer science) · Environmental crime · Environmental justice · Indigenous · Indigenous rights · Language change · Opposition (politics) · Ratification · Environmental law and policy · Indonesian Legal and Regulatory Studies · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses