Indonesia needs fair competition law: Tunky

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia badly needs a fair competition law to improve the country's efficiency, Minister of Industry Tunky Ariwibowo said yesterday.

"To ensure high efficiency, our country clearly needs a law on fair competition," Tunky said in a keynote address at a seminar on economic law reform organized by the Inter-Pacific Bar Association.

Many parties have expressed concern about the absence of fair competition legislation, said to be needed to provide a level playing field for all economic players.

Tunky called on the local legal community to help improve the country's economic legal framework.

"Indonesia's business community is waiting for the contribution of our legal experts from all layers of society so that we may improve our legal system, particularly in facing the unavoidable impact of the era of globalization," the minister said.

He added that legal experts could use the results of the government's deregulation and bureaucratic reform programs as one of their sources in planning improvements to the country's legal system.

He said that, while Indonesia's economic reforms had included the enactment of laws on limited liability companies and the capital market, it still needs to enact more economic laws. The laws needed include new laws on investment, secured transactions and alternative dispute resolution, he said.

"These legal issues are of the utmost importance in our development process as we enter the era of globalization," Tunky said.

Concurring with Tunky's suggestion, Normin S. Pakpahan, chairman of the Economic Law and Improved Procurement Systems Project, said that Indonesia needs to speed up its economic law reforms to ensure legal certainty.

Normin said Indonesia's arbitration, bankruptcy and contracts laws, for instance -- which are still based on colonial laws -- are inadequate for the needs of the modern business community.

"In many instances, the out-dated laws are simply ignored and each conflict is resolved on an ad hoc basis," Normin said.

"A very positive development is that the Minister of Justice has appointed a committee to prepare a draft of an arbitration law, which is a subject of utmost importance to the business community," he added.

He said that, through the current step-by-step efforts at economic law reform, Indonesia is attempting to modernize its commercial law system to facilitate private and public investment, improve productivity, encourage innovation and augment its international competitiveness.

Meanwhile, Sunaryati Hartono, head of the National Law Reform Agency at the Ministry of Justice, said that legal reform involves, not only changes to legislation, but also reforms of the people's values and attitudes.

At the same time, she said, legal reforms should also touch on the modernization of legal institutions, including their procedures and mechanisms, as well as of the whole legal infrastructure, including the legal education system. (rid)