The Centre for Democratic Institutions commissioned Prof. Simon Butt, probably the foremost Western expert on Indonesia's Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi) jurisprudence, to assess the MK's handling of local elections cases in this report. In particular, Butt worries that the court had not adequately defined its standard for overturning an election (a "structured, systematic, and massive" breach) and does not rigorously evaluate evidence.
This report was published in March, so long before Akil-gate, but it still provides invaluable to the MK's elections cases and some of the problems that plagued the system even before this October. One has to wonder now how much of the MK's fuzziness on these matters was deliberate.
Critics agree that much of Southeast Asia desperately needs judicial reform and rule of law. Yet, there is remarkably little comparative scholarship on law and legal institutions in the region. In this blog, I'll follow constitutional developments in Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, East Timor, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
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