Substantiating Green Claims: Corporate Liability and the Burden of Proof for Greenwashing under Indonesian Consumer Protection Law

Abstract

Environmental claims such as “eco-friendly”, “biodegradable” or “carbon neutral” now shape purchasing decisions in Indonesia, yet no Indonesian statute defines greenwashing or sets a standard for substantiating such claims. This article asks whether existing Indonesian law can already qualify greenwashing as an unlawful act, under which legal elements, and what burden-of-proof model should govern environmental claims. Using normative legal research with statutory, conceptual, case and comparative approaches, it analyses Law No. 8 of 1999 on Consumer Protection element by element, its interaction with Law No. 1 of 2024 on Electronic Information and Transactions and the e-commerce rules, Indonesian decisions on misleading claims, and greenwashing decisions from the Netherlands, Germany and Australia. Three findings emerge. First, Articles 8(1)(f), 9(1) and 10 of the Consumer Protection Law are legally capable of covering false and unsubstantiated environmental claims without a new statute. Second, enforcement fails less for want of prohibitions than because of the evidentiary structure: consumers must disprove claims built on information held by the company, while administrative sanctions under Article 60 do not reach Articles 8 to 10. Third, Article 28 of the same law, which already reverses the burden of proving fault in compensation claims, provides a doctrinal foundation for a duty of prior substantiation. The article proposes a substantiation model in which business actors must hold verifiable evidence at the time a claim is made, generic claims are presumptively misleading, and sanctions are graduated by the claim’s seriousness.