Annulment of Arbitral Awards as an Extraordinary Legal Remedy: Distortion or Protection of Justice

This paper examines the annulment of arbitral awards within the Indonesian legal system as an extraordinary legal remedy that intersects with the principles of arbitral autonomy and final and binding effect. The background of the study is grounded in the growing reliance on arbitration as an efficient and autonomous mechanism for resolving commercial disputes, alongside emerging controversies arising from judicial intervention in annulment proceedings. This research employs a normative legal method, using statutory and conceptual approaches. The research stages include identifying legal issues, collecting and classifying relevant legal materials, conducting normative analysis, and drawing deductive conclusions. The results and discussion demonstrate that Law Number 30 of 1999 strictly limits annulment to procedural defects of a fundamental nature, such as document forgery, decisive new evidence, or fraud, and does not permit substantive review of arbitral awards. However, judicial practice reveals interpretative inconsistencies that risk distorting arbitral finality. The study concludes that annulment should function as a procedural safeguard to protect justice without undermining the essence of arbitration.