Upholding of justice continues to be an illusion

Upholding of justice continues to be an illusion

Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

If justice could cry, it would be running out of tears as it
endures the pain of being ruthlessly manipulated by the corrupt
judicial system.

Three years after the fall of the despotic New Order regime of
president Soeharto, the reform movement seems to have made no
impression on the fraudulent justice system in the crisis-riddled
country.

Like in the past, there is currently no reason to feel proud
of the system. The country has seen a number of controversial
decisions delivered by the judicial system from the district
court to the Attorney General's Office and the Supreme Court.

Megawati Soekarnoputri's repeated promises to improve law
enforcement have raised taxpayers' hopes of a more just Indonesia
but, unfortunately, there has been little improvement as far as
the fight against corruption is concerned.

High-profile cases, such as those involving relatives and
cronies of former president Soeharto, largely remain up in the
air.

Still fresh in people's minds is the way the last bastion of
justice, the Supreme Court, issued a spate of controversial
decisions on Hutomo "Tommy" Mandala Putra Soeharto, Indonesia's
best-known suspect.

Last year, the South Jakarta court convicted him of graft and
sentenced him to 18 months in jail. The then president
Abdurrahman Wahid rejected his plea for clemency. Tommy's lawyers
then filed a review with the Supreme Court, a legal move without
precedent.

The Supreme Court, to everybody's amazement, exonerated Tommy
-- who had been on the run -- from all charges in October. In the
next bizarre move, Chief Justice Bagir Manan in his legal opinion
recommended that Tommy be put in jail for 11 months, the same
amount of time that had passed between his conviction and
capture. The funny thing was that the Chief Justice issued his
opinion even though the Supreme Court's verdict in favor of Tommy
was still in effect.

Tommy, whom the police have treated like a returning prodigal
child, will be jailed as soon as the police finish questioning
him in relation to at least four cases, or so they have promised.

Critics say that justice here has lost its way, and fewer and
fewer people now express faith in the legal system. Rather than
seeing the guilty face their just desserts, Indonesians have
instead witnessed verdicts and rulings that offend their sense of
justice.

Toward the end of the year, no less a figure than the Speaker
of the House of Representatives was suspected of involving in a
Rp 40 billion graft case.

Despite the inconsistency of his statements over the case,
dubbed Buloggate II, Akbar Tandjung, managed to survive
politically toward the year end.

Akbar, several time a member of the now defunct New Order
government, is also chairman of Golkar party, Soeharto's
political machine for 30 years.

A House plenary session on his case was proposed but there
seemed to be a conscious effort among the power brokers to buy
time.

A just and fair trial--that is what Indonesia has been
yearning for.

In a state that has adopted the continental legal system, like
Indonesia, where there is no grand jury, justice is entrusted to
judges, who interpret it as part of a by-the-book process of law.

Under such a system, Indonesian judges tend to glorify legal
procedures, and it gives them solid grounds for delaying trials,
holding up the implementation of court rulings and abrogating
charges due to obscure indictments, among other things.

People's distrust has pulled the judges down from their
thrones. They no longer see the judges' order as the "order of
God".

This year, several Supreme Court and retired justices, and one
judge of the high court, were brought to trial for allegedly
accepting bribes. This rare show was conducted by a government-
appointed joint team in charge of eradicating corruption within
judicial bodies.

But predictably a chorus of judges rejected the cases. They
argued that the suspects' investigator was no longer in service
and that they had been charged under the old anti-corruption law.

Instead, to the outrage of critics, the courts tried, on
defamation charges, those who had initially filed the complaints
that brought the justices to trial.

Legal observers pointed out that most judges had lost their
courage, creativity and lack of professionalism.

As legal sociologist Soetandyo Wignjosoebroto once put it, the
judicial system in a constitutional state should operate on the
basis of the ideas and the ideology of legal supremacy, and not
the procedures.

In other words, a judge should dare to make his/her own
interpretation of the law without betraying the people's sense of
justice. For that, a judge should be knowledgeable and
experienced. They need specialization.

An improvement in the last bastion of justice would completely
change the image of the country's judicial system.

The installment of Bagir, who is an academic, as the chief
justice earlier this year has kindled hopes for the emergence of
a credible Supreme Court in the years to come. His promise of
transparent and accountable decision-making by the courts is yet
to materialize.

Thanks to his leadership, the Supreme Court has a junior chief
of justice in charge of putting the house in order. Supreme Court
justices are supposed to make sure that their professional code
of ethics is duly respected. Now, dissenting opinions are allowed
among the panel of justices to allow scientific examination.

His other promise was to stop the widely-condemned "memo
practices" in which a memo from someone in a powerful position
could shoot down a court ruling. Critics have facetiously called
the practice "the fifth stage of appeal" that can be attempted
after all the tedious legal processes have failed to save the
person in legal difficulty.