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Chief Justice Arief Hidayat delivered his speech as keynote speaker at a national seminar in Faculty of Law Universitas Mataram (FH Unram), on Saturday (2/5). Photo PR/Hamdi

 

 

Regional elections should organized in line with its culture and philosophy for improve law structure and substance. Its culture and philosophy are associated with thorough understanding on regional elections and the relation between leaders with people. The statement was delivered by Chief Justice Arief Hidayat when he became keynote speaker at national seminar entitled “Problems of the 2015 Unison Regional Elections” held on Saturday (2/5) in Faculty of Law Universitas Mataram.

“We hold regional elections, legislative elections, and general elections not only from its structure and substance, but also from its intangible philosophy and culture. It means the understanding on elections and on relation between leaders and people are not holistically understood,” explained Arief in front of the audience.

Moreover, Arief said that leaders should able to build communication with their people anytime, not only during elections. Leaders should be more intensive to communicate with their people. Intensive communication resulted on people’s vote. “Recently, a lot of leader candidates want instant result and not in line with the philosophy, such as being helpful but impose their will during election period. They reclaim all their aid when they gather low votes. I hope people not elect this kind of candidates,” Arief added at the seminar held for celebrating 48^th Dies Natalies of FH Unram.  

According to Arif, people and their elites recently suffered nation collective disorientation. Their purpose of being state elite was obscure. “It is different with our founding fathers; they suffered with imprisonment due to their struggle to manifest nation ideals. But recently our elites are very greedy of power and end up in prison,” Arief added.

Arief also said good law enforcers could manifest fair law enforcement even if the law prevailed wasn’t good enough. “Give me a good police, a good attorney, and a good judge. Fair law enforcement could be manifested even if the law prevailed is not good enough. We should imitate our founding fathers spirit. Thus the elections could run with less problems and less noisy, in which the dispute occurred in almost all regional elections and filed to the Constitutional Court only because every candidates wants to win,” asserted him who also a law professor of Universitas Diponegoro.

Another social problem was people distrust. According to Arief, the problem could worsen the nation, in which people were easily provoked to defend something that is not necessarily true.  

“Indonesia nowadays is suffered from low trust society. People are suspicious to each other. Anything said in public were suspiciously considered as incorrect,” said Arief.

According to Arief, a good law was a law which had good structure, good substances, and good culture. Arief considered the law in Indonesia was substantively and structurally good, but the culture was not good enough.  “It already occurred in New Order where the law development was regarded as socio-culture development, then it excluded as separate part. In fact, the most important matter is the moral value of law culture development which inexistent until the fall of Suharto. On March, the law culture appeared in the State Policy Guidelines (Garis-Garis Besar Haluan Negara –GBHN), but it disappeared on May. There is no development of law culture until today,” Arief added. (Hamdi/Prasetyo Adi N)   

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