LEGISLATING INTERNATIONAL LEGAL AMBIGUITY IN A CONTENTIOUS DEMOCRACY: Indonesia’s Interpretation of Global Maritime Cabotage Principle.

In this paper, we show that the ambiguousness of international legal principle is an open vessel for the receiving domestic politics to appropriate, so much so that it becomes self-contradictory. To a great extent, this international legal ambiguity has rendered international legal principle to be meaningless. To substantiate it, we discuss how global maritime cabotage principle is being translated in Indonesia. The Indonesian case suggests that both legal and extra-legal considerations have equally informed the ever-shifting meaning of cabotage principle. Clearly, this signifies that the process of domestic legislation plays the determining role in defining the semantic content of an international legal principle. In other words, it is important to take the domestic process of legislation seriously. As such, this paper presents a contribution to the discourse of the rule of law building in developing legal systems, such as Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]