Legal Literacy - Imagine a morning in a public service office where a citizen has to wait for hours only to be told that the authorized official is in a "meeting", while behind the counter glass, piles of files that should have been completed yesterday are left to gather dust. This scene is so common, so banal, that we tend to accept it as a "risk of life" in this country. However, behind the lethargic face of bureaucracy, there is a large ulcer that in our legal discourse we call maladministration. The problem is, in our legal governance, maladministration is often only considered a "typo" or "procedural negligence" that is forgiven with a formal apology or a verbal reprimand that leaves no trace. When practices like this are accepted as normal, the state is actually teaching one dangerous thing: that negligence of power is not a mistake, but a tradition. Maladministration is not just a procedural failure, but a crime of power legalized by habit.

Maladministration as a Crime of Power in a Rule of Law

Every government action, no matter how small, is essentially an extension of power that must be subject to the law. As emphasized by Hadjon (2007: 95), every government action must be legally and morally accountable because it concerns the use of authority derived from the people's mandate. So, if we delve deeper into the recesses of legal philosophy, maladministration is actually the most real form of betrayal of the social contract. When the state fails to provide proper services, it is actually systematically violating the constitutional rights of citizens. We need to build a new legal construction: that serious maladministration is a convergence of unlawful acts by the authorities (onrechtmatige overheidsdaad), gross negligence, and violations of citizens' constitutional rights. In the perspective of state administrative law, compliance with the General Principles of Good Governance (AAUPB) is not an option (optional), but an obligation (imperative).

As Ridwan (2016: 182) asserts, AAUPB is the benchmark for the legitimacy of government actions; without it, we will only be trapped in a condition of "shameless state" a condition where violations of procedure are considered a common occurrence.