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.