Criminal Law

We defend clients from the earliest stage of investigation through trial and, where necessary, appeal, treating the presumption of innocence not as a slogan but as a working discipline that shapes every submission we make to police, prosecutors, and the court. Criminal exposure rarely announces itself conveniently. It typically arrives as a summons to appear for questioning, a dawn search, or a report lodged by a counterparty who has decided that a civil grievance is better pursued through a police station than through a courtroom — a tactic not unknown in Indonesian commercial disputes, and one our criminal practice exists in part to counter. The quality of counsel retained in those first hours, before a single statement is given to an investigator, often determines the trajectory of everything that follows.

Our role begins with the investigative stage under the Indonesian Criminal Procedure Code (KUHAP), where we ensure that a client's right to counsel, right to silence, and right to a lawful arrest and detention process are honoured in practice and not merely in principle. We prepare clients for questioning, review the legality of searches, seizures, and detentions, and, where a detention or an investigative act exceeds its lawful basis, we pursue pre-trial remedies designed precisely for that purpose. As a matter proceeds to prosecution, we scrutinise the indictment for both substantive and procedural defects, and we build the defence case with the same evidentiary discipline we bring to any litigation — because a criminal court, unlike a civil one, measures a case against the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt, and every weakness in the prosecution's evidence deserves to be tested against that standard.

Our criminal practice extends to white-collar and economic crime — fraud, embezzlement, breach of trust, and the criminal provisions that increasingly attach to corporate and financial conduct in Indonesia — as well as to ordinary criminal matters where a client's liberty, livelihood, or reputation is at stake. We advise corporate clients on criminal exposure arising from regulatory breaches, and we advise individuals navigating a system in which the line between a civil dispute and a criminal complaint is, in practice, often thinner than the statute suggests.

Throughout, our obligation is to ensure that the record reflects the full and accurate facts, that no procedural shortcut is taken at the client's expense, and that the client is never left to navigate the investigative or judicial process alone. A criminal matter, more than almost any other area of practice, is one in which the client's position is weakest at precisely the moment counsel is most needed — and we structure our availability accordingly.