S

everal lawmakers are planning to summon members of the Election Organizers Ethics Council (DKPP) to clarify the recent ruling that allows 18 minor political parties to undergo factual verification.

The controversial ruling has made the DKPP a target of criticism.

“The House of Representatives has to take firm action. The House needs to summon the ethics council as soon as possible,” Golkar Party lawmaker Taufiq Hidayat said during a discussion in Jakarta on Friday.

Taufiq said that most of his colleagues at Commission II, which oversees domestic governance, felt that the DKPP had overstepped its authority.

He was referring to a DKPP ruling that ordered the General Elections Commission (KPU) to carry out factual verification on 18 political parties while, in fact, those parties had been disqualified for their failure to fulfill administrative verification requirements.

According to Taufiq, the DKPP had no authority to issue such a ruling as it was established solely to settle allegations of ethics violations committed by the KPU and the Election Supervisory Committee (Bawaslu).

“The DKPP’s ruling [ordering the KPU to carry out factual verification on 18 political parties] will affect the election stages. Therefore, the council has clearly exceeded its authority,” Taufiq said.

If the House took no action against the council, he said, it was likely that the DKPP would disrupt election stages in the future.

The DKPP is an independent body that was established to respond to code of ethics violations allegedly committed by election organizers in 2009. Before becoming an independent body, it was an ad hoc institution.

In 2010, when the DKPP was still ad hoc, it dismissed Andi Nurpati from the KPU after she was found guilty of breaching the KPU’s ethics code. Andi was an active member of the ruling Democratic Party while serving as a KPU member.

The DKPP is currently led by Jimly Asshiddiqie, a notable legal expert and a former Constitutional Court chief justice. Under his leadership, the DKPP has dismissed dozens of local KPU commissioners in Southeast Sulawesi, Tulang Bawang regency in Lampung and Depok in West Java.

“Pak Jimly probably thinks he is still a Constitutional Court chief justice,” Taufiq said

Taufiq’s views were echoed by political analysts and election observers. They all considered that Jimly had gone too far in issuing the ruling that could affect election schedules.

Political analyst Syamsuddin Haris said the ethics council should focus only on cases relating to ethics violations. (riz)