Govt acts to revive trust in legal system

Berni K. Moestafa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

A joint government team has drawn up an action plan to revive public confidence in a legal system beset by endemic corruption, but experts have dismissed the plan as lacking the teeth to enforce sweeping reforms.

The team, working under the auspices of the Office of the Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs, has drawn up a plan to reform the country's laws, judiciary, Attorney General's Office and National Police. A separate plan is aimed at fighting corruption.

"It's a short-term action plan covering programs that run until 2004," said the team's chairwoman, Leila Ratna Komala, during a discussion with legal experts on Thursday night.

Five government institutions worked on the plan, with funding from the Partnership for Governance Reform -- a body that manages funds from creditor countries supporting government reform programs.

The team was made up of representatives from the Supreme Court, the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, the National Police, the Office of the Coordinating Minister for Political and Security Affairs and the National Development Planning Board (Bappenas).

Leila, who is the deputy for security and political affairs at Bappenas, said work on the plan began in January and was scheduled to be completed this year.

"By September we hope to obtain the commitment of our legal executives," she said, referring to the ministers or heads of each institution represented on the team. "Toward 2004 we expect public confidence to start to build."

The plan might be the most comprehensive legal reform program the government has undertaken since the 1998 fall of Soeharto, which was followed by an alarming decay of the country's judiciary.

A visiting United Nations envoy last month called Indonesia's judiciary one of the worst he had seen since taking up his role as a UN rapporteur on judicial independence in 1994.

Public confidence in the legal system has diminished, a fact that has been blamed for the rise of street justice and mob killings over the past few years.

A rash of controversial verdicts against foreign investors has added to the pressure from donor countries for judicial reform.

The draft plan covers five areas of reform, with each outlined in terms of specific activities, targets, output, means of implementation and monitoring mechanisms.

Among its recommendations for legislation reform, the team proposed a list of laws, ranked according to priority, to provide the necessary legal framework to improve the legal system.

On judicial reform, it proposed regulations to improve the credibility of verdicts, paying judges higher salaries and tightening the recruitment process for judges.

On reforming the police, the team urged improved education for officers and increasing the number of recruits. It said reforms in the Attorney General's Office required a steering committee to improve the division of authority between the police and Attorney General's Office.

In the battle against corruption -- seen as the biggest hurdle in reforming the judiciary -- the team suggested inventorying unresolved corruption cases to recoup state losses.

But several legal experts who took part in the discussion with the joint government team, said the plan was too weak. They feared the absence of the political will from the concerned institutions would render the plan ineffective.

Prominent corporate lawyer Kartini Mulyadi said the plan reflected no sense of emergency. She also raised concern over leaving the plan in the hands of the people responsible for the current state of the legal system.

"We have here a patient who doesn't admit he is sick," she said, referring to the institutions that made up the joint team.

Lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis said the plan seemed to him to rely too much on the bureaucracy for its implementation.

While Teten Masduki of the Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) said the team made an incorrect assumptions in thinking the country's judiciary could improve by itself.

Last month the ICW released a study of judicial corruption, depicting a neat system of a corrupt legal system from the police and prosecutors to judges.

"We need something pragmatic, something short term. This program isn't workable," Teten said.

Criminologist Adrianus Meliala, who is an adviser to the Partnership for Governance Reform, however, said the program went a long way toward getting the five institutions sit together and think about a comprehensive solution.

"It's their program. There is a sense of belonging which we hope will make it work," he said.