A Response to Commodore Salim, Head of Pusjianmar Seskoal: Bakamla and the Legal Foundations of Maritime Security in Indonesia

 

A Response to Commodore Salim, Head of Pusjianmar Seskoal: Bakamla and the Legal Foundations of Maritime Security in Indonesia

By Rear Admiral (Ret.) Soleman B. Ponto

Commodore Salim, now Head of the Maritime Studies Centre of the Indonesian Navy Command and Staff College (Pusjianmar Seskoal), wrote Pathway to Indonesia's Maritime Future in 2015, when he was a Commander serving as the Indonesian visiting naval fellow at the Sea Power Centre – Australia. The paper is a valuable contribution to the discussion of Indonesia's maritime future, particularly its emphasis on maritime domain awareness and inter-agency synergy. It reflected the optimism surrounding BAKAMLA's establishment at the time. Developments since then, however, invite a closer look at one of its central proposals: strengthening BAKAMLA into a coast guard with command authority and a role in integrating maritime investigations.

Constitutional Court Decision No. 180/PUU-XXIII/2025 has asked the government and the House of Representatives to redesign BAKAMLA's duties and authority. Two options are commonly discussed: returning BAKAMLA to a coordinating role, or granting it investigative authority. Each raises questions that deserve careful consideration.

Security at sea as a matter of law

Discussions of maritime security are often approached from a strategic, military or operational perspective, as Commodore Salim's paper largely does. These perspectives are essential, but they are not sufficient on their own. Security at sea is, at its core, also a legal matter. Every action taken at sea, from a routine patrol to the arrest of a vessel, must rest on a clear legal basis and be carried out by an authority that the law recognises. For this reason, anyone who wishes to speak meaningfully about security at sea needs a sound grasp of legal science.

This includes several fields of law at once. Constitutional law explains how state authority is divided and where each institution derives its powers. Criminal procedure law determines who may stop, inspect, arrest and investigate, and under what conditions. Administrative law governs the relationship between ministries, agencies and their mandates. The law of the sea, including UNCLOS 1982, defines what a state may and may not do in each maritime zone. Without this legal foundation, even the most carefully designed strategy may lack legitimacy when it is put into practice.

Understanding the law enforcement system as a starting point

In Indonesia, these legal questions are answered by the criminal procedure system and the sectoral laws, which assign investigative authority to specific agencies according to their fields of government affairs. Any discussion of maritime security therefore needs to begin with a clear understanding of how law enforcement at sea is organised.

Without this understanding, analysis of maritime security can easily drift toward models that work well in other countries but do not fit Indonesia's legal framework. The single coast guard model is a good example. It suits states whose legal systems concentrate maritime enforcement in one agency, but Indonesia has deliberately distributed that authority among several investigators. Proposals that overlook this difference risk heading in the wrong direction, however well intentioned they may be. The Constitutional Court's decision on BAKAMLA shows the consequences: an institution was given coercive powers without a clear place in the law enforcement system, and its legal basis was ultimately called into question.

For this reason, the discussion that follows approaches BAKAMLA's future from the perspective of Indonesia's legal and law enforcement system, rather than from an operational or comparative perspective alone.

The Constitutional Court's decision as an affirmation

Decision No. 180/PUU-XXIII/2025 did not create a new principle. It affirmed one that has long existed in Indonesia's constitutional order: coercive actions at sea, such as stopping, inspecting and arresting vessels, may only be carried out by law enforcement agencies with a clear legal mandate and through due process of law. The decision also recognised that granting such powers to BAKAMLA had created overlaps with the agencies that already hold them.

Under Article 24C of the 1945 Constitution, decisions of the Constitutional Court are final and binding. Any future redesign of BAKAMLA must therefore be consistent with the reasoning of this decision. A design that again gives BAKAMLA coercive powers without a proper place in the law enforcement system, or that adds another investigator to fields already covered, would contradict the principles the Court has affirmed. Such a design would be open to challenge and would very likely fall once again, because it would conflict with the 1945 Constitution. The decision itself already provides that if no redesign is made within two years, BAKAMLA's law enforcement powers will lose their binding force.

The decision should therefore be read not merely as an order to revise a few articles, but as a constitutional compass for the redesign that follows.

1. Lessons from the coordination model

Indonesia has some experience with the coordination model. Bakorkamla was established in 1972 and revitalised under Presidential Regulation 81/2005, yet over several decades it struggled to coordinate the agencies involved in maritime law enforcement. This experience was one of the reasons Bakamla was created in 2014.

Commodore Salim himself notes that Bakorkamla was a relatively weak body whose role was largely limited to information sharing. It may therefore be worth asking whether a return to coordination would produce a different result this time, or whether it would face the same challenges as before.

2. The basis of investigative authority in Indonesia

Granting BAKAMLA investigative authority also presents difficulties. In Indonesia's legal system, investigative authority generally follows from a field of government affairs. Article 17 of the 1945 Constitution provides that each minister is responsible for a specific field, and these fields are elaborated in sectoral laws to which investigators are attached:

• Fisheries → Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries (KKP)
• Shipping → Ministry of Transportation (KPLP)
• Customs → Ministry of Finance (Customs and Excise)
• Environment → Ministry of Environment
• Energy and mineral resources → Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources (ESDM)
• General crimes → National Police (Polri)
• Sovereignty and the EEZ → Indonesian Navy (TNI AL)

Within this framework, each investigator enforces the laws that fall within its institution's field. BAKAMLA does not yet have a distinct field of government affairs or a substantive law of its own. A natural question follows: which laws would BAKAMLA investigate without overlapping with the existing mandates of other agencies?

3. The question of institutional placement

The paper places BAKAMLA under the Coordinating Ministry for Political, Legal and Security Affairs, with coordination alongside the Coordinating Ministry for Maritime Affairs. Coordinating ministries do not themselves administer a specific field of government affairs, so they may not provide a natural home for an investigating agency. Meanwhile, the line ministries responsible for maritime matters each already have their own enforcement units. Finding a suitable institutional placement for BAKAMLA therefore remains a challenge.

4. Existing roles at sea

It is also worth noting how comprehensively maritime functions are already covered:

• The military role is performed by TNI AL, which also holds investigative authority in the EEZ and in fisheries.
• The law enforcement role is shared among the sectoral agencies according to their respective laws.

Figure 3 of Commodore Salim's paper illustrates this well. The elements of sea power it lists (TNI AL, Polairud, Customs, KPLP, KKP, Immigration, ESDM and others) together cover most maritime functions. This raises the question of what distinctive role BAKAMLA would play alongside them.

5. Closing reflection

The overlap of mandates at sea may be less a matter of "silo mentality" than a reflection of how authority is allocated under Article 17 of the 1945 Constitution and Indonesia's sectoral laws. Seen this way, it is part of Indonesia's own model of maritime law enforcement rather than a flaw to be corrected by centralisation. Constitutional Court Decision No. 180/PUU-XXIII/2025 has affirmed this model, and any redesign that departs from it is unlikely to stand.

Strategy and law must therefore go hand in hand. A maritime security framework built on strategic thinking alone, without a firm legal foundation, risks being struck down in court, as BAKAMLA's experience has shown. Commodore Salim's call for stronger information sharing and operational synergy remains highly relevant. The key question for the redesign mandated by the Court is how BAKAMLA can contribute meaningfully within Indonesia's legal model. As Head of Pusjianmar Seskoal, Commodore Salim is well placed to lead further study of this question, ideally giving the legal dimension as much attention as the strategic one.