Ensuring better justice

Ensuring better justice

Suggestions that a law be passed to guarantee the independence of public prosecutors should not be rejected right away. One proposal, which was suggested by a legal expert, is to authorize the House of Representatives to appoint the attorney general, as is already the case with several other state institutions. We further propose that public prosecutors be declared officials of the state, rather than the government, which would further ensure their independence.

All this can be done with no difficulty, since the matter is not regulated by the Constitution. In fact the Constitution does not say a word about the status of public prosecutors. In any country which is based on the supremacy of law, however, it is normally the rule that public prosecutors are kept independent from the state's judiciary administrators.

It is now up to the Indonesian people to decide whether public prosecutors are government officials with responsibility to the President or independent officials responsible only to the people.

They must also decide if the attorney general is appointed by the President and either directly named by him, or on the basis of proposals from the House of Representatives.

-- Suara Karya, Jakarta