Legal reform going nowhere, commission tells President

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Four years since the beginning of the reform era, legal reform is still going nowhere because the government, the legislature and the judiciary are reluctant to cooperate to guide reform, the National Legal Commission (KHN) said.

Presenting this to President Megawati Soekarnoputri on Thursday, the commission underlined the importance of drawing up a blueprint for legal reform.

"There is no cooperation at all between the legislature, executive and judiciary to promote reform," commission member Harkristuti Harkrisnowo said.

The commission cited that the lack of coordination left open an opportunity for the existence of too many contradictory regulations, poor-quality legal apparatus and abuse of power in most legal institutions.

Another commission member, Fajrul Falakh, said that the continuing discord between state agencies had tainted the image of Indonesia's legal system.

"In their steps against errant judges, for instance, all three state branches of power seem to have different approaches and they should be united," Fajrul said.

However, the commission refused to go into detail, saying that it had conducted research into the matter, the results of which would be made public in early October, after they had been presented to the Cabinet.

Analysts have repeatedly stressed that legal reform is the most important step to safeguard the reform movement in the country, which started in mid-1998.

Only by ensuring a sense of justice would the public believe in and support the government's attempts to curb corruption and uphold respect for human rights.

However, after four years, corruption continues to plague legal institutions, resulting in many controversial court decisions, and this has greatly disappointed the public.

Many questionable court decisions, such as the acquittal of central bank Governor Sjahril Sabirin in a multimillion-dollar corruption case and controversial legal proceedings against House of Representatives Speaker Akbar Tandjung in another multimillion-dollar graft case, have continued to taint the reform movement in the legal sector.

In those cases, the government repeatedly said that the verdict was the responsibility of the Supreme Court and the government could therefore not interfere in those decisions.

"Bearing in mind these examples there needs to be a similarity of view from all three state branches of power on how we are going to proceed with legal reform," Fajrul said.