Democracy and respect for law

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