Gus Dur's lawyer pans Court's legal opinion

JAKARTA (JP): A lawyer of President Abdurrahman Wahid expressed his regret over the Supreme Court's refusal to give a legal opinion on the legality of a special session of the People's Consultative Assembly.

Lawyer Luhut MP Pangaribuan regretted that the Supreme Court had failed to act as mediator in settling the dispute between the government and the House of Representatives, which on Wednesday called for the Assembly to hold a special session to ask the President to account for his administration's performance.

"By refusing to give a legal opinion, the Supreme Court has shown that it has no power to do anything," Luhut told The Jakarta Post by telephone.

Luhut hinted that he would file a response over the Supreme Court decision, but he declined to reveal it, since the court had not yet officially submitted its conclusion to the President.

The government had asked the court to issue a decision on the validity of the House' censure motion that was based on the President's alleged involvement in two financial scandals.

Supreme Court Chief Bagir Manan stated that a team of supreme justices had completed a study on it. However, he denied to disclose their conclusions before they had been submitted directly to the President.

Bagir also said, "President Abdurrahman Wahid has asked for it to be confidential."

A source close to the court, however, said that the court had refused to give any legal opinion, arguing that the most appropriate institution to give an opinion on political disputes was the Assembly, not the Supreme Court.

"I agree that such a political dispute should be settled by the Assembly," Luhut said.

"But our request to the court is not to ask them to settle the dispute. We were just asking the court to give its legal opinion over the differences of interpretation on the special session between the government and the House."

"I guess we were addressing the most appropriate institution when we asked the Supreme Court to do this," Luhut said.

Separately, political observer of the University of Indonesia Eep Syaifullah Fatah said the current political dispute between the House and the government again showed that the country lacked appropriate legal institutions.

"As we can see, even the Supreme Court cannot act as mediator to bridge the dispute between the two state institutions over their differences of interpretation on the constitution," Eep told reporters, after meeting Coordinating Minister for Political, Social and Security Affairs Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

"If we don't want such a thing to happen again, I guess we will have to form a kind of Supreme Court on the Constitution," Eep said. (02)