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What’s a democracy sans credible rule of law?
Justice, including law enforcement, has been the weakest link among the main democratic elements since Indonesia began political reforms in 1998.
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Senior Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) investigator Novel Baswedan (right) walks after reporting the antigraft body leaders to the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) on May 24. The employees reported the KPK commisioners pertaining to the controversial civic knowledge test for employees as part of the mandatory transition to civil servant employment status. (Antara/M. Risyal Hidayat)
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f you are looking for an example of a democracy with a weak rule of law, look no further than Indonesia, the country that often prides itself as the third largest democracy in the world and the largest democracy among Muslim-majority nations.
Indonesia has held five relatively peaceful free, fair and democratic elections in the last 23 years, and it has seen regular changes in government, suggesting that it has a functioning electoral democracy. But when it comes to the question of rule of law, we suck at it, to put it mildly.
This is clear from the latest World Justice Project (WJP) report, published on Thursday, which indexes and ranks nations in terms of their rule of law performance. Indonesia, according to the report, ranks 9th out of 15 countries surveyed in the East Asia Pacific region.
It is not exactly comforting to see that the Philippines and Thailand, two nations that became democratic earlier than Indonesia in the 1980s and 1990s after long years of authoritarian rule, rank lower, with one going back to a junta rule and the other to authoritarianism.
Indonesia’s democracy is not far from meeting the same fate as its two neighbors, at least going by the scoring and ranking from the WJP. Indonesia’s overall score is 0.52, where 0 is poorest and 1 is a perfect score. Thailand scored 0.50 and the Philippines 0.46.
Ranking behind Indonesia are Vietnam, China, Myanmar and Cambodia. Among Indonesia’s Southeast Asian neighbors, only Malaysia and Singapore perform better. These rankings raise serious questions about the democratic commitments of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) as enshrined in its charter, if members perform poorly in the rule of law index.
Globally, Indonesia ranks 68th out of the 139 countries surveyed, dropping two places in the past year, according to the WJP which publishes the annual report. The fact that we are not even in the top half puts our claims of democracy to shame.
