Marriage, Family Autonomy, and Human Rights in Indonesia: Rethinking Legal Protection in Contemporary Family Law

Abstract

Marriage in Indonesia sits at the intersection of state law, religious doctrine, customary practice, and constitutional human rights guarantees, producing a family law regime that is simultaneously protective and restrictive. This article investigates how the legal architecture built around Law No. 1 of 1974 concerning Marriage, as amended by Law No. 16 of 2019, mediates the tension between family autonomy and individual rights, particularly for women and children. It asks whether contemporary Indonesian family law has kept pace with international human rights norms, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, or whether legal pluralism continues to generate protection gaps that state institutions have only partially closed. Employing normative juridical research with statutory, conceptual, and case-law approaches, the study analyses judicial reasoning in landmark Constitutional Court decisions, recent legislative reform, and current scholarship on marriage age, interfaith marriage, and post-divorce protection. The findings show that judicial activism—most visibly in Constitutional Court Decision No. 22/PUU-XV/2017 on the minimum marriage age—has outpaced legislative and administrative reform, leaving implementation fragmented across religious courts, civil registries, and customary institutions. The article argues that rethinking legal protection in Indonesian family law requires reconciling family autonomy with a human rights-based approach that treats women and children as rights-holders rather than as objects of familial authority, and proposes a reform agenda combining harmonized legislation, judicial consistency, and community-level legal literacy.