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.