Justice? It's not just a Jakarta affair

Andrea Fitri Woodhouse, Justice for the Poor team, World Bank, Jakarta

Jakarta was abuzz recently with talk of the Akbar Tandjung verdict. Supporters claimed Supreme Court independence; other observers cried foul. Whatever the verdict, one thing was clear. Indonesians want a legal system they can trust.

The question is how to help it work better. To many, the answer is obvious. Make better laws, ensure they are enforced, and clean up the police, prosecutors and courts. In short, many observers advocate top-down systemic reform, the more comprehensive the better.

No doubt such reform is important. Indeed, there are some promising signs, such as the Supreme Court's recently released Blueprints for Legal Reform, a set of impressive step-by-step guides to overhauling key parts of the judicial system. Such moves are to be applauded.

But systemic reform takes time, and would-be reformers are up against strong vested interests. For reform to succeed, politicians must give it a backbone. The future of such political support will not be clear until after the upcoming elections.

Meanwhile, millions of Indonesians are excluded from the judicial system. The front steps of the Supreme Court would seem remote to most people in Indonesia. For poor people, in cities and across the countryside, local courts are just as distant. But the poor and not just the rich need a judicial system that works, and for many of the same reasons: To help protect their rights, secure their land, fight corruption and reduce the threat of violence.

What, then, can be done to help the system serve the poor? A new World Bank report attempts to answer this question. Village Justice in Indonesia asks poor people across Indonesia about their experiences of local justice and tracks their attempts at resolving problems such as corruption and land tenure. The report has good news and bad, but suggests that there is space at the local level to improve the way the justice system works -- if handled properly.

How should this be done? A few principles can be drawn from what poor people say and do.

First, justice is not just about the courtroom. Most people -- village heads, local leaders but also ordinary men and women -- prefer to resolve problems informally. They do so personally, through local customary law (adat) or through village consultations (musyawarah). The reasons are simple. They think resolving problems informally is cheaper, easier and quicker than taking problems to court.

Moreover, they express fear and distrust for the legal system, worrying about corruption and bias toward the powerful. "If you report a case in Indonesia," says one villager in the study, "it's like you're reporting a master to his friends".

But informal dispute resolution is no panacea. It works when two parties in a dispute have roughly equal bargaining power. But if one is a poor villager and the other a local strongman or village head, the prospects for the poor villager look grim. Why? It is partly because village leaders use muscle to get the solutions they want. But it is also because of the weaknesses of the legal system.

A poor villager is more likely to agree to a bad settlement if the alternative is to try using a legal system that is costly and hard to access. The rich, for their part, are unlikely to fear the threat of legal sanction if they know courts can be bought off easily.

Making justice reform relevant to people's lives thus means focusing on the informal as well as the formal. How? A start is to promote fair, accessible out-of-court mechanisms for resolving disputes. Since the formal and informal are related, though, strengthening the formal system is likely to have good knock-on effects. If the courts are fairer, informal dispute resolution will be too.

Are there ways to make the local courts fairer, even while waiting for top-down reform? Here, the research has mixed news. With proper support, villagers in the cases studied were willing to try the legal system as a last resort to fight corruption, despite the obstacles they faced.

Their experiences in trying to get to court, though, were mostly bad. Police and prosecutors mistreated villagers, neglected investigations or derailed them if perpetrators had money, power and influence. "The role of the police is to frighten people," said one Kalimantan villager in the study, whom police treated as a provocateur for reporting corruption.

Yet when villagers were able to push cases through to the courts, their experiences were better. Villagers were mostly satisfied with the way trials were held, and in some cases the courts managed to sanction even powerful perpetrators of corruption successfully.

In Lampung, for instance, a judge was able to put a corrupt government official behind bars, despite the defendant's family links in the legislature and in the prosecutor's office.

What makes for success? There is no clear recipe. But successful cases had common themes. Villagers had facilitators who were able to link them with legal activists, civil society groups, religious organizations and other institutions with an external power base. These organizations built coalitions with local media to monitor the performance of police and prosecutors, applying pressure when underhand business emerged.

They also built links with the reformists who emerged from within -- honest police officers, prosecutors and judges -- to share information about how cases were progressing.

In some cases, decentralization created incentives for government officials and legislators to champion cases to enhance their political standing. Helping the system to work well was thus as much a socio-political matter as a technical one.

So, while we watch for reform at the top, some things can be done at the bottom. Support out-of-court mediation, but help it to be fair. Fund district paralegals to link villagers with NGOs, media groups and legal activists. Fund NGOs to monitor the performance of police, prosecutors and courts. Find ways to support the reformers that do exist within the system and help them build networks with one another.

Support programs to ensure that all court decisions are routinely published. Help ensure that village councils work well and that district regulations encourage fair elections. The World Bank's Justice for the Poor program is designed to support just such efforts.

All these actions should help. But we should not lose sight of the prize. Ultimately, far-reaching systemic reform must proceed. It will be difficult and it will take time. But unless it is taken seriously, the kinds of local actions we advocate -- though useful in themselves -- will only be like tinkering at the edges.