A bulwark of justice?
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.