Constitutional amendment hurts reform: Activists

Fitri Wulandari and Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

As the upcoming Annual Session of the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) will focus on the fourth batch of amendments to the 1945 Constitution and exclude the President's accountability report from its agenda, political activists expressed doubts on Monday that the session would be beneficial for the country's democratization process.

The gathering, slated for Aug. 1 through Aug. 10, is expected to finalize the deliberation of seven chapters of the fourth raft of amendments to the Constitution.

The activists noted that the legislature's failure to involve the general public in the amendment process would make the amended Constitution still far from what was desired.

Hadar N. Gumay of the Center for Electoral Reform (CETRO) suggested that the process, which began in 1998, should have involved the people and not let all the decisions be made by the politicians in the Assembly.

Grouped under the Coalition for the New Constitution, CETRO and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as activists, have repeatedly pushed for a transparent process involving the public.

"Without public participation, the amendment process will only produce a poorly amended Constitution, like the one we have now, which has been the subject of misinterpretation and abuse," he told The Jakarta Post in an interview.

The Assembly, instead, has established an internal ad hoc committee to carry out the task as mandated by the 1998 Special Session of the Assembly following the downfall of the 32-year Soeharto regime.

However, the process has proven sluggish -- by comparison, Thailand needed only eight months to come up with a new Constitution -- due to apparent horse-trading and the reluctance of a part of the legislative body to have the Constitution amended, seeing the process as violating "the sanctity of the Constitution".

Ironically, the country's founding president Sukarno had clearly pointed out that the 1945 Constitution was provisional as the country was still in a state of war.

Political scientists have argued that the substance of the Constitution of having been adopted from a fascistic concept of the state as practiced by the Nazi regime in Germany, which focused on overriding the power of the president and the fundamental role of the functional groups, a situation revived under Golkar, the country's ruling political force in the past.

A better, new and more comprehensive constitution, Sukarno then said, should be produced as soon as possible.

The horse-trading practiced in the legislature was clearly reflected in its controversial constitutional products, where the politicians refused to return power to the people, the activists said.

Human rights activist and lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis, who also is a member of the coalition, pointed out that while several of the amendments deserved praise, the amended Constitution was not based on clear paradigms but rather was founded on conflicting principles.

"The product is not a proper Constitution because there are too many open-ended clauses subject to conflicting interpretations."

Both Hadar and Todung hinted of a gloomy future for the amendment process, fearing that the growing opposition to it would result in deadlock during the upcoming annual session.

The coalition renewed its demands that the upcoming session endorse the amended Constitution as a transitional constitution pending the establishment of an independent constitutional commission, a view that has also been supported by some political parties.

With the setting up of a constitutional commission, a new, more solid Constitution would likely be produced, they said.