Individual Legal Responsibility for Unlawful Orders within Police Institutions and Its Relevance to International Human Rights Norms

Résumé

Police institutions rely on hierarchical command to maintain operational discipline, yet orders that appear administratively valid may still be unlawful or incompatible with international human rights standards, placing officers between obedience and personal legal responsibility. Using a normative–comparative approach, this article examines Indonesia’s statutory framework and police ethics regulations and compares them with selected jurisdictions that accommodate refusal of unlawful orders through procedural safeguards, constitutional guarantees, and protected reporting mechanisms. The analysis identifies a normative and procedural gap in Indonesia: the command structure is affirmed in law, but explicit statutory protection for officers who refuse unlawful orders is absent, while ethics-based rules offer limited, internally managed safeguards that are insufficient to prevent retaliation and do not provide clear legal certainty. The lack of formal refusal and reporting procedures, combined with weak whistleblower protection, tends to shift practical risk to frontline executors and encourages organisational responses that prioritise discipline over legality review. To align command discipline with individual accountability under international human rights norms, the article proposes an integrated framework consisting of statutory codification of “unlawful orders” and “manifest unlawfulness” criteria, enforceable anti-retaliation protections, review and oversight channels not fully controlled by the chain of command, documented standard operating procedures for objection and escalation, and organisational incentives and training that treat legal compliance as a core indicator of professionalism.