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)