Justice? It's not just a Jakarta affair

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.