Supreme Court urged to act against corrupt judiciary
Supreme Court urged to act against corrupt judiciary
Ridwan Max Sijabat, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta
A renowned legal practitioner has called on the Supreme Court to
awake from its long sleep and take measures against the corrupt
judiciary system as part of the ongoing nationwide anticorruption
drive.
Todung Mulya Lubis told The Jakarta Post here on Friday that
the Supreme Court should not wait for complaints and reports from
the public but rather had to be proactive and closely supervise
the judicial process, especially when it involved high-profile
trials.
"The recent cases of Nurdin Halid, Adiguna Sutowo and Tengku
Syaifuddin Popon show strong indications that the court mafia
truly exists, and the Supreme Court has to take measures to
eliminate it," he said.
He said the Supreme Court apparently did not care that
citizens were disappointed with recent contentious decisions
courts had made in high-profile cases.
Nurdin Halid, an official of the Golkar Party and chairman of
the Indonesian Distribution Cooperative (KDI), was acquitted of
corruption charges this month.
Adiguna, who faced a life sentence for shooting dead Yohannes
Rudy Nathong, a university student and bartender at the Hilton
Hotel, only received seven years jail.
Meanwhile, Syaifuddin Popon was caught red-handed by
investigators trying to bribe a Jakarta High Court clerk
apparently in a bid to influence the court's ruling against
Abdullah Puteh, the former governor of Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam,
who was sentenced to 10 years jail by the antigraft court for
corruption. Ironically, the appeals court upheld the earlier
ruling.
Todung, also a human rights activist, said the controversial
verdicts were made under a corrupt judicial system and went
contrary to the law and to citizen's sense of justice.
He said the court mafia really existed, but it was very
difficult to provide hard evidence of its existence.
He said that whenever judges handed down controversial
verdicts it could reasonably be assumed that bribery was
involved.
"The recent arrest of Popon, who was caught red-handed giving
Rp 250 million to a clerk of the Jakarta High Court, is an
indication that giving bribes to lobby judges and other law
enforcers is a common practice in the judiciary system," Todung
said.
Separately, Kaman Sijabat, a lawyer at law firm Kaman Sijabat
& Partners, concurred, saying giving bribes to judicial officers
has been a "public secret" for years in this country.
He said he has handled hundreds of cases over the last several
years and only a few have required payments and gratuities to law
enforcers and court staff.
"Lawyers have been forced to give bribes to pursue their
clients' interests. They pay the police to let their clients go,
they pay prosecutors to negotiate sentences, or they pay court
clerks and judges to overlook their clients' sins," he said,
adding that law enforcers often created conditions that meant
that those implicated in high-profile cases and their lawyers had
no other choice than to give bribes.
Todung and Kaman were of the same opinion, saying that the
Supreme Court was too slow in responding to public complaints and
criticism of the systematic corrupt practices in the courts.
"Besides conducting regular supervision, the Supreme Court
should respond quickly to public complaints and criticism on any
controversial court verdicts by deploying a special inquiry team
to check the bank accounts of judges trying the cases," Todung
said.
Both also complained that the Supreme Court was not
transparent when dealing with public reports of graft cases in
the district courts and High Court.