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