Muladi's drive for judicial reform

With our Seventh Development Cabinet barely two months old, Minister of Justice Muladi has by his words and actions raised hopes among the public that the government is sincere in its stated intention to carry out a judicial development program.

Now, people are asking what kind of support Muladi is prepared to give to the attempts to bring about political reforms. It seems that, without much publicity, the minister of justice and Minister/State Secretary Saadilah Mursjid have together already approached the chairman of the House of Representative's working group on national legislation, who happens to be the House's deputy chairman Syarwan Hamid, on this matter.

Muladi has hinted that he hopes the House of Representatives will have the courage to use its right of initiative with regard to the revision of legal products dating from the colonial and the Old Order periods, which are now considered to be in conflict with the legal code as well as with the spirit of the times.

Among the legal products ready for abrogating and replacement with new legislation is the law against subversion. The controversy surrounding this law has been going on for more than three decades. During all these years -- under both the New Order and the Old Order -- this particular law has been effectively used to silence opposing voices. The excesses of its implementation have encumbered the most elementary efforts by Indonesians to uphold human rights.

From colonial times into the Old Order era and up to the present, the implementation of the antisubversion law has remained the same in soul and design: the subordination of the law to the interests of those in power. As a consequence, its interpretation in subordinate legal products has often tended to display the aspect of a "law-enforcing force" more than as a means to protect the public. To read about people who disappear, only to be found later, and for us to hear about the experiences they had to endure during the time they were missing makes our hair stand on end.

It is to be hoped that Muladi and his team members will find the strength to face the forces that have so far made it an established practice to subordinate the law to particular interests.

-- Republika, Jakarta