A Comparative Study of Restorative Justice in Criminal Law Enforcement in Common Law and Civil Law Countries and Its Implications for Indonesian Legal Reform

This study aims to analyze and compare the application of restorative justice in the criminal legal systems of Common Law and Civil Law countries, and examine its implications for criminal law reform in Indonesia. The restorative justice paradigm emerged as an alternative to the retributive justice system, which has focused on punishing the perpetrator rather than restoring the victim and the community. Using a normative-comparative juridical approach, this study examines various restorative justice practices in the United Kingdom, Canada, and New Zealand, representing Common Law, and the Netherlands, France, and Indonesia, representing Civil Law. The analysis shows that the Common Law system is more adaptive and provides broad discretion to law enforcement officials to implement restorative-based solutions, while the Civil Law system tends to be more bound by a legalistic framework and requires firm legal regulations before implementation. Nevertheless, both systems show the same direction towards a more humanistic and participatory law enforcement. In the Indonesian context, the application of restorative justice needs to be strengthened through the harmonization of laws and regulations, increasing the capacity of law enforcement officials, and establishing an integrated penal mediation institution. These findings confirm that national criminal law reform should adopt a hybrid approach that combines the flexibility of Common Law with the legal certainty of Civil Law to create a criminal justice system that is socially just and restorative.