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.