Constitutional Court Decision 205/PUU-XXIV/2026 is a 2026 ruling of the Constitutional Court of Indonesia on a petition for material review of Pasal 76(2) of Undang-Undang 35/2009 on narcotics, the provision allowing an arrest by narcotics investigators to be extended by up to three times twenty-four hours.^[1][2] The petition was brought by an individual citizen who had been arrested and named a suspect in a narcotics case in April 2026.^[3] It is one of the constitutional review cases in the field of criminal law and procedure pronounced by the Court on 16 July 2026.^[4]

The Court held that it had jurisdiction but did not reach the petitioner's standing or the merits. It found that the relief sought had been framed as two alternatives that asked for the same reading of the provision, separated only by the choice between a declaration of unconstitutionality and a declaration that the provision had no binding force, and that this made the petition unclear (obscuur).^[5] The operative order declared the petition inadmissible, and Pasal 76(2) was left as enacted.^[4:1]

¶ Provision under review

Pasal 76(1) of Undang-Undang 35/2009 limits the exercise of the arrest power given to investigators by Pasal 75 huruf g to at most three times twenty-four hours from the time the arrest warrant is received by the investigator. Pasal 76(2) provides that such an arrest may be extended by at most a further three times twenty-four hours.^[2:1]

¶ Petition

The petition, dated 5 June 2026, was received by the Court's registry on 8 June 2026, registered on 9 June 2026 and revised in a filing received on 27 June 2026.^[1:1] It argued that Pasal 76(2) was contrary to Pasal 28D(1) of the 1945 Constitution, on fair legal certainty and equal treatment before the law, and to Pasal 28G(1), on protection of the person and freedom from fear.^[6] Its grounds contrasted the provision with Pasal 96 of Undang-Undang 20/2025, the new Code of Criminal Procedure, which limits an arrest to one times twenty-four hours unless another statute provides otherwise; on the petition's account, a narcotics suspect could therefore lose liberty for up to six times twenty-four hours before detention.^[6:1][7] The evidence filed consisted of the petitioner's own arrest, extension, investigation and detention papers and a pretrial ruling of a district court.^[3:1]

The relief asked the Court to declare that Pasal 76(2) was contrary to the Constitution unless read to mean that an extension of arrest may not be applied to a suspect who has already been arrested and is in the investigator's custody, or, in the alternative, that the provision had no binding legal force unless so read.^[8]

¶ Ruling

At the preliminary examination on 18 June 2026 the panel advised the petitioner to repair the sections of the petition on jurisdiction, standing, grounds (posita) and relief (petitum), and set a deadline of 1 July 2026 under Pasal 39 of the Constitutional Court Law and Pasal 36(3) of Peraturan Mahkamah Konstitusi 7/2025.^[9] The Court accepted that the revised petition followed the prescribed structure, but held that the formal sufficiency of a petition also depends on the accuracy of each section's content and on the correspondence between the grounds and the relief, citing the grounds on which Pasal 68 of Peraturan Mahkamah Konstitusi 7/2025 allows a petition to be declared unclear.^[10]

Reading the relief, the Court found that the two alternative items asked for the same reading of Pasal 76(2) and differed only in that one sought a declaration that the provision conflicted with the Constitution and the other a declaration that it had no binding force. The Court treated the two phrases as a single formula, since a provision found to conflict with the Constitution loses its binding force by that finding, and held that splitting them into alternatives left it unclear what was being sought. It declared the petition unclear and did not consider it further.^[5:1] The decision was reached in deliberation on 2 July 2026 and pronounced on 16 July 2026, with Suhartoyo presiding; no separate opinion is recorded.^[4:2]

CRPG's regulatory tracker published an account of the decision on 21 August 2026. That account gave a mismatch between the provision named as the object of review and the provision addressed in the relief as the ground of the ruling; the decision's own reasoning rests on the alternative form of the relief.^[11][5:2] Two other criminal-law petitions, 202/PUU-XXIV/2026 on the Criminal Code and 213/PUU-XXIV/2026 on the Code of Criminal Procedure, were declared inadmissible on formal grounds on the same day.^[12][13]

¶ See also

• Constitutional Court Decision 260/PUU-XXIV/2026
• Constitutional Court Decision 256/PUU-XXIV/2026

¶ External links

• Decision (Mahkamah Konstitusi)
• Case record (Mahkamah Konstitusi)
• CRPG: Constitutional Review of Narcotics Arrest Extension: MK 205/PUU-XXIV/2026 (crpg.id, 21 August 2026)

¶ References