Electronic Theses and Dissertation

Article 88 of environmental protection and management act provides strict liability principle where it is applicable to activity that uses and produces toxic and hazardous waste as well as activity that poses serious threat to environment. strict liability principle imposes obligation for responsible party whose activity has caused loss to compensate without regard of subjective and objective fault elements. the principle has been interpreted in court decisions of forest fire as part of tort and as a liability appear when precautionary principle is applied in tort lawsuit which deviates from the concept of strict liability principle as liability without fault that does not recognize fault element. the purposes of this research are to find out the reason that is likely to cause inaccurate interpretations of strict liability principle by indonesian court in handling forest fire cases and to understand the application of strict liability principle in aceh forest fire cases. the research is in the type of normative legal research. this method will describe and analyze the application of strict liability provisions in indonesian law, based on article 88 of epma in forest fire cases. the result showed that reasons on inaccurate interpretation, are insufficient legal instrument, that is, no clear rules on limitation, definition, special procedural law, and issuance of mandated regulation to enable implementation of the principle. also, the law enforcement where different conceptual understanding of judges and plaintiff as well as lack of environmental certified judges who shall try environmental cases has led to inaccurate interpretations. the second result shows that strict liability was applied inaccurately in aceh forest fire cases, where it is applied as part of tortious liability. there are two recommendations from this research. first is to establish better legislation and regulation that correspond to each other in harmony and strengthened enforcement mechanism to realize the application of strict liability principle. second, issuance of regulation that provide complete procedure for application of strict liability for plaintiff, defendant and judge so that there will be no more misunderstanding about the use of the principle.