The Doctrine of Unequivocal Waiver: Evaluating The International Legitimacy of In Absentia Corruption Trials Amid Indonesia’s E-Summons Verification Vacuum Under Law No. 20 of 2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.38035/jlph.v6i5.3777Keywords:
In absentia, E-Summons, Unequivocal Waiver, Mutual Legal Assistance, Asset RecoveryAbstract
Indonesia's in absentia trial mechanism for corruption cases faces a chronic legitimacy crisis, in which domestic convictions frequently prove non-executable in foreign jurisdictions. The research gap addressed here is the absence of scholarship linking the technical verification vacuum in electronic summons (e-summons) to the doctrinal requirements of Unequivocal Waiver under international human rights law. This study aims to evaluate why the normative vacuum in Article 150 paragraph (2) of Law No. 20 of 2025 on Criminal Procedure undermines the legitimacy of in absentia corruption trials under Article 38 of the Anti-Corruption Law, and to formulate a strategy for optimizing the Mutual Legal Assistance (MLA) instrument. Using normative legal research with statutory, conceptual, comparative, and case approaches, the study tests Indonesian regulation against the Unequivocal Waiver doctrine and the Sejdovic v. Italy jurisprudence. The results show that treating a mere “sent” status as valid legal notice, combined with the prohibition on legal representation for absent defendants under Supreme Court Circular No. 6 of 1988, systematically defeats the actual-knowledge standard required internationally. This novelty proposes a Verified Digital Waiver protocol grounded in digital audit trails and biometric authentication to restore executorial legitimacy and support cross-border asset recovery
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