Lack of justices blamed for judicial corruption

Muninggar Sri Saraswati, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Corruption and backlog cases remain major problems at the Supreme Court, despite efforts to solve them, Chief Justice Bagir Manan told the country's legislators on Friday.

The Supreme Court chief admitted that they had failed to eradicate judicial corruption, but was quick to add that the failure was due to a lack of justices, funds and facilities.

Bagir told legislators at the Annual Session of the People's Consultative Assembly that the Supreme Court had tasked its monitoring division to establish a judiciary that was free of corruption, collusion and nepotism by optimizing its monitoring functions.

"As a result (of the monitoring), the court has proposed punitive actions against 11 judges," he said, pointing to the Supreme Court's achievement in its anticorruption drive this year.

In addition, the court's secretary-general had taken punitive measures against five Supreme Court employees for misconduct, he added.

"By last month, the Supreme Court had received 397 reports on alleged misconduct by its employees and judges," he said.

The monitoring division, which was set up last year, handles reports on corrupt, collusive and nepotistic practices allegedly involving the court's employees and judges.

Even so, few of the misconduct cases have been brought to trial.

Earlier this year, the Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) reported on the widespread corruption in the country's judicial system, which involved a wide range of players -- from Supreme Court justices to parking attendants of a district court.

The watchdog even labeled the judiciary as "the true winner in the corruption race in the country".

In a sensational bribery case last year, a middleman involved in the affair was convicted, while the two Supreme Court justices linked to the bribery were acquitted from all charges.

During his presentation, Bagir complained that the court did not have enough justices, despite the installment of 18 additional justices in June. He said that the 43 judges currently sitting on the court were not sufficient to handle the backlog of 16,581 cases.

The number of backlog cases this year is higher than last year's 15,570 cases. The Supreme Court receives some 5,000 new cases every year.

"There will be four justices who are going into retirement this year," he said.

Ideally, the Supreme Court should have 51 justices.

Bagir expected the judges to process some 10,000 backlog cases this year.

He urged lawmakers to issue regulations to help limit the cases that could be brought to the Supreme Court to prevent more cases from piling up.

In the meantime, Bagir said, the Supreme Court had tried to settle the problem by other means, including supporting out-of- court settlements.

The chief justice also complained about the lack of funds and facilities that had hampered the Court in its efforts to improve its performance.

The government has disbursed Rp 116 billion for the Supreme Court in this year's budget, which is double the budget allotted in 2002.

"The amount is not sufficient, although it has helped the Supreme Court to improve its performance," Bagir told legislators.