Lawyer tell legislators to produce simple regulations
Lawyer tell legislators to produce simple regulations
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Poor law enforcement in the country can be partly blamed on
lawmakers who fail to produce simple but understandable
regulations, experts said on Thursday.
Lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis said many regulations, ranging from
laws to contracts, were prone to using complicated words, thus
creating multi-interpretations and opening up numerous loopholes.
"We can't create a ruling that is only understood by those who
have studied law. That is arrogant," Todung said during a
discussion that followed the launch of a new law journal,
Jentera.
He admitted to having frequently met with difficulty in
understanding regulations here due to the word complexities they
contained.
Another expert, Karni Ilyas, agreed with Todung.
Karni said the country's laws were not only difficult to
understand, but open to interpretation and misuse by people with
various vested interests.
National Police chief Gen. Da'i Bachtiar issued earlier this
year a decree dismissing some officers who had reached the age of
55, although Law No. 2/2002 on the National Police set the
retirement age at 58. The previous retirement age was 55.
Da'i defended his decree, arguing that the new retirement age
in the new law could not take effect because the government had
not issued any operational regulations. The dismissed officers
are challenging the decree in the State Administrative Court.
According to Karni, the practice of creating overly complex
regulations had been going on for more than 20 years, with little
effort from the government and related institutions to correct
the practice.
Todung questioned the lawmaking process, which passed through
linguists though the results remained poor.
"If the mechanisms work, why are so many rulings still very
difficult to understand?" he asked.
Suhariyono, senior official at the Ministry of Justice and
Human Rights, said many rulings used words that were difficult to
explain.
He said "elastic" phrases like "for the sake of the general
public" and "emergency status" opened the way to different
interpretations, paving the way for abuse by those in power.
"These words can cause injustice in the end," he said.
Suhariyono said lawmakers could initiate a law on the
interpretation of rulings, setting in concrete the definitions of
legal terms often used in rulings and regulations, thus putting
an end to the confusion and multi-interpretations.
"Australia produced such a law. Now there are no different
interpretations of rulings thanks to the Interpretation Law," he
said.
He said the content of the such an interpretation law could be
extended to accommodate new legal terms.