A bulwark of justice?

After a delay that lasted for more than nine months, President Abdurrahman Wahid finally named Bagir Manan chairman of the Supreme Court on Saturday, thereby eliminating one of his many points of discord with the national legislature, the House of Representatives.

As may be recalled, the House of Representatives in August last year named two candidates -- Muladi and Bagir Manan -- to fill the vacant position of chairman of the Supreme Court. Although passed by the House, their nomination was opposed by the largest faction -- that of the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) -- as well as by President Abdurrahman Wahid. Their argument at the time was that both candidates were, as members of the Golkar party, representatives of the New Order regime of President Soeharto, whose administration was characterized by a blatant subservience of the law to those in power.

Given the current state of affairs within Indonesia's judiciary, the first and foremost task of a chairman of the Supreme Court in the view of most legal experts and practitioners would be to restore the judiciary to its erstwhile position of independence. That would mean his or her willingness and capability to defeat what Indonesians have come to know as the country's "judiciary mafia", under whose strong and omnipresent influence justice is for sale to either the strongest party in a case or to the highest bidder.

Given the complete decay that the Indonesian judiciary suffered under Soeharto's New Order regime, eliminating such a "mafia" may not be a task one could easily entrust a leading exponent of the New Order judiciary system. Neither, however, would it befit well-meaning proponents of the current reform movement to harbor undue suspicions of partiality -- or worse, corruptibility -- on the part of every constituent of the former New Order regime.

The best thing to do under the circumstances would be to allow Bagir a certain amount of time -- say, a hundred days -- to prove the sincerity of his promise to clean up the entire judiciary from the lowest ranks to the highest and to restore its position to that of a bulwark of justice respected by all.

In comments he made during his fit-and-proper test before the House of Representatives in August last year, after all, Bagir -- who is a professor at Padjajaran University's School of Law in Bandung -- vowed he would take a number of steps to clean up the judiciary as soon as he was installed as chairman of the country's Supreme Court. These would include improving the quality of court verdicts by improving the quality and integrity of judges and introducing a system of recruitment and promotion on the basis or merit rather than purely administrative considerations.

Further measures promised would be to bring order to the administration of the country's judicial institutions, assuring the independence of courts and court verdicts, renewal of laws where required and other such actions as deemed necessary to restore the prestige of the country's judiciary.

His sudden appointment to the top post at the Supreme Court naturally gave rise to speculation that the move was yet another attempt by President Abdurrahman "Gus Dur" Wahid to strike a political deal with one of his adversaries, in this case Golkar. In an interview he gave to the Jakarta newspaper Koran Tempo, however, Bagir denied he had ties to any political party and regarded suspicions of a political deal as unwarranted.

In any case, especially given that the President no longer seems to have any other alternative but to accept one of the House of Representatives' two candidates, Indonesians have reason to welcome the fact that, at long last, the highest court in the country is no longer without a helmsman. For the rest, let's give the new Supreme Court chairman the chance he deserves to prove himself up to the task of taking on this most complicated job.