Supreme Court urged to take action against court mafia

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.