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JAKARTA (Suara Karya): Chief Justice of the Constitutional Court, Mahfud MD, said that the Constitutional Court needed to be given to settle constitutional complaint, because most of the cases submitted were actually belong to that area.

“There are many cases in the people that do not have a passage in the court, meanwhile, human rights have been thrusted and people are helpless in the name of legal certainty because the case has been settled in the Supreme Court (MA)," saud Mahfud MD in the discussion meeting with the member of Law MAgister Program of Gadjah Mada University in the Constitutional Court Building, Jakarta, Monday.

If the Court is given another authority, then it will be able to settle the constitutional complaints. Mahfud then took the Ahmadiyah joined decree as an example. As a decree, it should have been brought before the Court of Jurisdictional Dispute. Nevertheless, considering the character of it as a rule then the Court of Jurisdictional Dispute denied it with the reason that the decree should have been brought before the Supreme Court.

According to Mahfud, the Constitutional Courts in this world normally had three authorities. Besides as a forum previligiatum and judicial review, the Constitutional Court also had an authority to accept the file concerning constitutional complaint submitted by anybody to the Court who felt that their constitutional rights had been violated. It was not because of the existence of legislation, but it was due to the verdict of a court using wrong legislation as the ground.

When setting up the Constitutional Court, he explained, the lawmakers felt that it was enough to adopt with little change on the first two authorities without including the authority for constitutional complaint. Indonesian Constitutional Court acted as a medium in its function as a forum previligiatum.

So far, explained Mahfud, the Court had tried 144 legislation products. Meanwhile, since 1959 until 2003 when the Court was established, there had been no single legislation products tried because it was considered to violate the 1945 Constitution. That was the result of inexistence of rules to regulate that. "Actually at that time, it was considered many legislation products that violated the 1945 Constitution", he explained.

In the pre-amendment era, legislation should have come from the government/President’s initiative, whereas the Parliament and political parties almost disfunctioned at all.

Considering the impeachment (terminating a President from his position) taken by the consideration of the Constitutional Court, according to Mahfud, there was a little possibility. More over, if it was in relation to the President’s decision to raise the fuel price. Based on the 1945 Constitution there are only five things can be used as the reason for impeachment, those are if the President is convicted in bribery, corruption, betrayal to the State, committing serious crime, and doing improper activity according to the law. (Wilmar P)

Source www.suarakarya-online.com (26/08/08)

Photo courtesy of Constitutional Court Public Relation Doc.

Translated by Yogi Djatnika

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