The Declaration of Djuanda 1957

This year is the 60th anniversary of Declaration of Djuanda that integrates the whole territory of Indonesia including islands and waters. Indonesia is an archipelagic country that 2/3 of its territory comprising waters that connecting more or less 13.000 dispersed big and small, and also inhabited and uninhabited islands. The Proclamation of Independence on August 17th, 1945 and the Recognition of Sovereignty on December 27th, 1949 did not automatically unite its whole territory. According to the international Law of the Sea at the time, the coastal countries had a claim for the waters national jurisdiction only 3 miles ashore as the Dutch East Indies colonial legacy of the Ordinance of 1939 on the territorial sea. It was such a problem to an archipelagic country like Indonesia to enforce full sovereignty. Therefore, in the middle of the struggle for the West Irian (Papua), the government, initiated by some prominent figures, formed a joint ministerial committee to handle the problem. The committee found some difficulties to find a legal base to claim the maritime territories, until the Prime Minister of Djuanda Kartawijaya took an initiative to accomplish the task. On December, 1957 he unleashed an unilaterally official government promulgation on the Indonesian Territorial Waters and Maritime Environment that establishes such a territorial waters boundary, which is 12 miles from the sea baseline of the outer boundary points. Thereafter, it was enforced by making of several Acts and diplomatic efforts in the international scenes that experienced a lot of challenges and objections. Those are resulted in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) of 1982, that recognizes the Archipelagic State Principle as claimed by Indonesia. This is a historical research dealt with written resources that compiled, selected, criticized, analyzed, and constructed by historical methodology as developed and discussed in the territory of maritime history, i.e. a branch of historical studies.