Democracy and respect for law

I refer to Donna Woodward's article Rule of law or tyranny of law? (The Jakarta Post, March 8, 2001).

I sympathize wholeheartedly with Donna Woodward's cry of despair over the dexterity of bureaucrats who use literal interpretations to obviate legal proceedings. Nevertheless, I beg to disagree with her plea for greater interpretational flexibility.

Respect for the letter of the law is a fundamental principle in democratic society and government and is still very lacking in this country. The reason why its implementation has had the atrocious workings Donna Woodward rightly deplores, is the arbitrariness of only respecting the letter of the law when it serves certain ulterior motives of influential people.

At the present stage, it seems much more important to initially reach general and universal implementation of the letter of the law. When one has succeeded in reaching this still distant aim, there will always be time to also learn to weigh statutory intent against legal text. Even then, one will always have to accept occasional failures in enforcement of the law. The wisdom of letting a crook loose because of some formal procedural error, for sake of the higher value of conformity with the law, I think, is actually a legal principle implying a relatively advanced degree of civic maturity.

WARUNO MAHDI

Berlin, Germany