MPR told to side with public

MPR told to side with public

Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Experts asked the People's Consultative Assembly (MPR) on
Tuesday to focus more concern on people's interests rather than
their short-term political benefits in amending the 1945
Constitution.

Legal experts Adnan Buyung Nasution of the Indonesian Legal
Aid Institute (LBH) and Abdul Bari Azed of the University of
Indonesia said that the Assembly had not yet amended articles
that had a direct impact on the public.

Buyung said that of the 29 articles the Assembly had amended,
none sided with the people.

"So what is the current amendment process for? The result is
merely to serve the interests of the political elite," he said in
a symposium on the constitutional amendment held by the Golkar
Party.

Similarly, Azed questioned the importance of the amendment
process.

Both Buyung and Azed proposed that there should be an
independent commission whose members were nonsectarian experts
and non-governmental organizations, rather than the Assembly to
amend the Constitution.

Buyung said the Assembly had not touched Article 33, which
stipulates that production activities essential to the country
and governing people's lives should be controlled by the state.

This is ironic as many state-owned enterprises are planned to
be privatized, he said.

Article 34, which stipulates that poverty-stricken and
neglected children shall be cared for by the state, was also
needed to be elaborated on but the Assembly had not discussed it
despite various interpretations of the article, he added.

Due to the weakness of Article 34, he said, former president
Abdurrahman Wahid arbitrarily dissolved the social ministry when
people were hit hard by the economic crisis, thus abandoning the
government's obligation.

The Assembly has been amending the 1945 Constitution since
1999 to comply with the reform agenda after the fall of the
Soeharto regime in mid-1998.

But critics have said that Assembly members had a political
agenda, such as to win the 2004 election, which has created new
but unclear articles.

Therefore, there's a growing demand to set up an independent
commission to amend the 1945 Constitution.

Buyung accused Assembly members of having no clear concept or
vision for amending the Constitution, leaving loopholes in the
result.