Annulment of Indonesian Arbitration Award: Misinterpretation of Article 70, Supreme Court Correction, and Inconsistency of SEMA 7/2012

Abstract

Article 60 of Law Number 30 of 1999 on Arbitration and Alternative Dispute Resolution (the Arbitration Law) makes arbitral awards final and binding, yet Article 70 still allows District Courts to annul an award on three narrow grounds. The way these courts read Article 70 therefore determines whether finality holds in practice and raises a question about the scope of judicial power under Article 24 of the 1945 Constitution. Prior studies have documented the tendency of District Courts to treat annulment applications as disguised appeals, but they have not mapped the specific errors in judicial reasoning or examined whether the Supreme Court’s technical guidance has kept pace with Constitutional Court Decision Number 15/PUU-XII/2014, which declared the Elucidation of Article 70 non-binding. This normative-prescriptive legal study applies case and conceptual approaches to three Supreme Court decisions (Numbers 234 B/Pdt.Sus-Arbt/2024, 355 B/Pdt.Sus-Arbt/2025, and 918 B/Pdt.Sus-Arbt/2023), using Gustav Radbruch’s three basic values of law and the doctrines of minimal curial intervention, competence-competence, and the prohibition of révision au fond. The analysis identifies four errors by District Court judges: an expansive reading of “fraud,” a reassessment of the evidence and merits, the acceptance of an abusive application that functioned as a disguised appeal, and a failure to distinguish a formal disposition (niet-ontvankelijk verklaard) from a substantive rejection (verworpen). In all three decisions, the Supreme Court corrected these errors by enforcing the limitative character of Article 70. The study also finds that Supreme Court Circular Letter (SEMA) Number 7 of 2012 still refers to the Elucidation of Article 70, which may mislead first-instance judges. The article contributes by identifying this gap in the judiciary’s technical guidance as a concrete target for revision and by proposing amended wording for Articles 70 and 72 of the Arbitration Law.