A parliamentary watchdog has called on the majority of Indonesia's lawmakers not to run in the April 2014 legislative election due to poor performance during their current term of office.

Lucius Karus, a senior researcher from the Concerned Citizens for the Indonesian Legislature (Formappi), said that according the watchdog organization's research, up to 90 percent of the 560 members of the House of Representatives displayed an unacceptable level of performance during the past term – the reason the House had managed to produce so few laws.

Formappi's figure for the number of unproductive lawmakers is even higher than the one quoted by House Speaker Marzuki Alie in 2011, when he said that "70 percent of the House members are carriers of disasters."

Karus was quoted by merdeka.com over the weekend as saying that voters would evaluate the performance of the lawmakers and, despite any aggressive campaigning, it would be the concrete results of their term in office that would determine their electability in 2014.

Aside from delivering few results in terms of passing laws, many lawmakers in the past term have also been dumped in jail for corruption, further eroding public trust in the legislative body.

A senior lawyer told the Jakarta Globe that of the total 600 laws passed by the House, at least 100 contain severe legal defects. Since 2004 alone, some 60 laws have been annulled by the Constitutional Court.

Therefore, Karus said, political parties must recruit more credible candidates to run in the next election and not allow the current members to return to their seats.