Willem Anthony Engelbrecht

Willem Anthony Engelbrecht (1839 to 1921) was a Dutch jurist and colonial administrator, born in Batavia, who was one of the originators of the Dutch Ethical Policy in the Dutch East Indies. After service as a second lieutenant in the colonial army in Borneo he studied at Leiden, where in 1862 he took his doctorate in both laws with a thesis on colonial law, arguing that the Indies should be treated as a state in its own right though subordinate to the Netherlands. He returned to the Indies as a civil servant, joined the Council of Justice at Semarang in 1862 and was its president from 1886 to 1891, then became Director of the Department of Justice, and from 1893 sat on the Council of the Dutch East Indies. After retiring in 1897 he drafted the reorganisation of the colony's laws of 1900 and in 1907 published them as the Nederlandsch-Indisch Wetboek, which became the basis of Indonesia's first legal code.