Anticipating UN mission
Judging from the ample news coverage in the newspapers on the oncoming visit of the UN fact-finding mission, under Special Rapporteur Dato Param Cumaraswamy, reportedly to assess Indonesia's legal system, while focussing on the independence of judges and law practitioners in particular.
As the pertinent practices in question affecting the judiciary, under the prevailing circumstances, knowingly involve the Commenrcial Court, the State Administrative Court and the Indonesian Human Rights Tribunal, only the tree courts were expressly cited in the commentaries. Actually, in terms of the overall framework of administration of justice, the Civil Court and the Criminal Court should be attended to also.
Amid the commentaries was one expressed by an authoritative source of the judiciary (The Jakarta Post of July 5) who suggested that the current judicial system should be assessed as compared with the system's condition of the country some years before, and not with the legal system of a developed country. It sounds rather odd that such a naive opinion should be expressed.
It must be argued that the Special Rapporteur in the person of a UN official who hails from a country whose modern legal system should belong to that of commonlaw, and not to the traditions and standards of the continental (civil law) system, should, by way of standard reference in making an evaluation, resort to the pertient system as may be appropriate, par excellence, for comparative purposes. This cannot be otherwise.
But what is essential for the Indonesian leadership engaged in the legal profession to recognize is the fact that the UNmission stays here for only ten days (from July 15 to July 25).It will be unrealistic to expect too many things from whateever recommendations coming from the mission as many entail from the study, interviews and observations during just ten days in Indonesia.
This means to say that in the search for solution in the current judicial system -- which derives from the Dutch system of the colonial times -- an accross-the-board reorientaion should be necessary to learn from the other developed law systems, including the judiciary, as well.
In the effort to make improvement and innovation in the current (judicial) system, refernece to and understanding of other relevant systems must be necessary.
S. SUHAEDI
Jakarta