Measuring the Urgency of Notarial Deeds in Ensuring Legal Certainty of Investment Contracts in Papua: Between Normativity and Practical Reality

Abstract

This article examines the importance of notarial deeds in ensuring legal certainty for investment contracts in Papua, a region with special legal status under the Special Autonomy Law and a strategic national investment destination. Investment in Papua faces multiple challenges, ranging from limited legal infrastructure, a shortage of notaries in remote areas, to potential conflicts between national law and local customary law. Using normative legal research with statutory, conceptual, and case approaches and a descriptive-prescriptive analysis, this article examines the position of notarial deeds within the Indonesian contract law framework and identifies the gap between the normative nature of the rules and the reality of practice on the ground. The results indicate that a notarial deed is legally mandatory only for certain investment-related legal acts, such as the establishment of a limited liability company and the creation of fiduciary security, whereas for other investment contracts its importance lies in its perfect and binding evidentiary force. In both capacities, notarial deeds hold a vital position as an instrument of legal certainty, but their implementation in Papua still faces significant structural obstacles, particularly the uneven distribution of notaries (only four active notaries serve the entire province of Highland Papua), the absence of technical guidance on verifying customary law communities and their representatives, and the lack of fully adaptive regional regulatory readiness. Based on these findings, this article recommends a regionally based notary formation and placement policy, technical guidelines for verifying the legal standing and representation of customary law communities in notarial practice, and continuing training for notaries serving in Papua, in order to achieve equitable legal certainty in Papua.