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Abstract

The enactment of Government Regulation No. 25/2024 has sparked constitutional debate in Indonesia. The regulation prioritizes Special Mining Business Permit Areas (Wilayah Izin Usaha Pertambangan Khusus, WIUPK) for religious organizations, raising critical questions about distributive justice and democratic resource governance under Article 33(3) of the 1945 Constitution. This study examines the constitutionality of this policy by asking whether the prioritization of WIUPK for religious organizations, as reviewed in Constitutional Court Decision No. 77/PUU-XXII/2024, violates Article 33(3) of the 1945 Constitution and what implications this holds for Indonesia's natural resource management paradigms and constitutional interpretation. Using doctrinal legal research, this study analyzes legal documents through constitutional and political economy lenses, particularly regulatory capitalism and rentier state theory, to interpret the Court's decision and its governance implications. This study finds that religious organization involvement, though appearing as democratization, in fact represents a strategic rent reallocation within regulatory capitalism. The Constitutional Court's deference to open legal policy reflects a shift from substantive to formalistic interpretation, as it declined to review PP No. 25/2024 and treated WIUPK prioritization as a non-justiciable policy matter, potentially enabling rent-seeking under the guise of religious empowerment. Addressing the underexplored intersection of judicial review and religious capitalism, this research indicates that judicial avoidance through the political question doctrine may facilitate elite capture in natural resource governance, offering a theoretical framework for analyzing semi-state actors. The study proposes three regulatory alternatives: (1) technical capacity-based prioritization, (2) hybrid eligibility with professional mining expertise, and (3) enhanced judicial review to balance religious empowerment with constitutional mandates of social justice.

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