Constitutional Court Is Asked to Prioritize Crucial Issues

The Association for Elections and Democracy (Perludem), Constitution and Democracy Initiative (KoDe Inisiatif), Center for Legal and Policy Studies (PSHK), and Correct ask Constitutional Court (MK) to prioritize crucial issues. Any issue that might heavily disserve the public in general should be handled first than other issues that may be considered as less urgent.

“MK should realize that their job is not only to assess the constitutionality of an issue, but they also have to be able to preserve the constitutional rights of all citizen. MK often late in resolving an important issue, and this, as the consequence, violate the constitutional rights of citizen,” says a researcher from PSHK, Mulky Sahdar, during a public discussion titled “Accelerate the Resolution for Judicial Review on Article 9 a Law No.10/2016” in Jakarta (02/23).

All four organizations recommend MK to set out a time limit to resolve every issue and judicial review that they handle. MK should not take too many time to resolve a case, especially during the judges meeting process and the announcement of the resolution, says Mulky.

“There are cases that they resolved quickly, and there are cases that take too long to be resolved. The issue regarding the use of electronic-Residents Identification Card (e-KTP) as voters’ identity was solved only in 12 days. Meanwhile, there are many disputes regarding the result of the last local elections that have not been resolved until today,” says Mulky.

In election issue, there are two judicial reviews that need to be decided by MK’s judges. They are judicial reviews on the meaning of “criminal comvict” in Article 7 Laws No.10/2016 and the obligation for incumbent candidate to take official leaves during campaign period.

“We need a clearer definition on the word ‘criminal convict’ in Article 7,” says Fadli Ramadhanil, a researcher from Perludem.