Court sets rule for class action lawsuits

Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The Supreme Court has taken the initiative to set guidelines for lower court judges in handling class action suits in a bid to fill the vacuum of a law on the procedures code.

Supreme Court deputy chief justice for civil cases Soeharto said on Monday that provisions on class action suits stipulated in several existing laws were still unclear.

"We are now drafting the rules and procedures of the Supreme Court as a guideline for the judges because class action lawsuits have been treated differently in each court due to the absence of such procedures," Soeharto told reporters at the sidelines of a seminar on the procedure and application of class action lawsuits in Jakarta on Monday.

The seminar was also attended by legal experts and practitioners from the United States, Canada and Australia.

The draft of the rules and procedures is expected to be completed in May 2002 at the latest. Soeharto said the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL) was involved in drafting the procedures.

The class action lawsuit has not been widely used in Indonesia since it was only introduced here in the late 1990s through the laws on the environment, consumer protection and forestry, which allow the public to entrust their legal rights to representatives.

Up until this year, a total of 45 class action lawsuits have been filed with the courts throughout the country but only few of them have been appropriately heard while many of them were rejected due to the lack of knowledge on the part of the judges.

"That is because both the representatives and the courts have no standard procedures," ICEL co-founder Mas Achmad Santosa said.

"Many believe that a class action lawsuit belongs to the Anglo-Saxon law system (where a case is judged by a jury) and that it was not applicable in Indonesia since it practices the continental or the civil law system," said Santosa, who was also a speaker in the seminar.

Santosa said that the draft of the Supreme Court's rules and procedures should also contain the minimum number of victims to be represented in the lawsuits as one of the basic requirements for a class action lawsuit.

"I think nine or 10 victims are enough to make a case besides the capability to identify the accused in the case and the causal relation between the accused and the incident," he explained.

Several non-governmental organizations grouped under the Advocacy Team for Flood Victims plan to file class action lawsuits against the Jakarta and West Java administrations and real estate developers in the name of the flood victims in those areas.