Legal awareness undermined by unlawful actions

Legal awareness undermined by unlawful actions

JAKARTA (JP): The legal awareness of Jakartans has been
undermined by the unlawful practices of the authorities, the
chief of the Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta) Luhut M.P.
Pangaribuan says.

"This circumstance has triggered the birth of novel cases in
the country's legal history," Luhut told reporters during the
institute's year end's press meeting.

He said the authorities' failure in complying with courts'
verdicts is clearly in evidence.

He cited a decision made by the Supreme Court last year,
ordering the management of the state-run PPD bus company to
compensate a bus conductor on the grounds that the management had
arbitrarily fired him. "The PPD management has not respected the
Supreme Court's order, saying that they have filed a request for
a review."

"Such a request for a Supreme Court's review should not have
delayed the implementation of the Court's order," he said.

This month's decision made by the Jakarta State Administrative
Court on a lawsuit filed by politician Sri Bintang Pamungkas
against an overseas travel ban issued by Attorney General
Singgih, was another case in point, he said.

He said that the Court's order to attorney general to revoke
his decree was physically of no meaning because Bintang is
already a defendant in another case, on charges of insulting
President Soeharto during a seminar in Germany last April. "The
Attorney General can thus issue another travel ban on Bintang
because of his defendant status."

Luhut also noted that the authorities sometimes were not
serious in handling cases. "People see this lack of serious
application and lose their confidence on the authorities."

He cited the investigation of the murder of Themanto, a
student of the Tarumanagara University in West Jakarta, whose
contents have yet to be disclosed.

Luhut said that the decline in popular trust in the legal
process provokes people into taking the law into their own hands.

Two lawyers, defending three men accused of gang-raping a
woman and her two daughters in Bekasi in July, were stoned, hit,
kicked and trampled on in September by an angry mob outside the
Bekasi District Court, some 40 kilometers east of Jakarta.

The people attacked the two defense lawyers, Petrus Bala
Pattyona and Hendar Puji Astoro, out of anger. Their hate for the
criminals who allegedly raped the two teenage girls and the
girls' mother was physically transferred to the suspects'
lawyers.

A similar act of violence occurred in October, when an angry
mob attacked the houses of Philipus Kia, the main suspect in the
murder of a woman and her three children in Bambu Apus, East
Jakarta.

Local residents ran amuck after hearing rumors saying that the
woman's 8-month baby who survived the murder died.

The LBH Jakarta handled 1,028 cases this year, 273 cases of
which were criminal cases, 218 were manpower cases, 149 land
dispute cases, and the remaining 388 miscellaneous cases.

The number of cases handled by the LBH-Jakarta was smaller
than last years' 1,208 cases.

Luhut predicted that the number of violations of the existing
regulation would increase next year.(imn)