Letter: Judicial reform is a must

Wed, 10/15/2008 10:29 AM | Reader's Forum

The lawmakers who attempted to pass the bill on the Supreme Court on Oct. 6 have failed because the bill itself was hastily made, even contrary to the normal lawmaking procedures as stipulated in Law No. 10/2004.

The bill was actually still in the deliberation stage of the drafting team, whereas according to the above law, there are three other stages that should be passed through, namely synchronization team deliberation, working committee plenary meeting and commission plenary meeting, before the bill is passed into law.

The hasty process the lawmakers were using, as many suspected, indicated their hidden motives. A number of the lawmakers behind the bill are, in fact, lawyers and many of them have been implicated lately in graft scandals.

The passage of the bill, they hoped, might have made the rulings on their legal cases, should they finally be processed through the Supreme Court, more lenient.

As the bill includes an extension of senior justices' retirement age to 70 years, it will be in favor of Supreme Court chief justice Bagir Manan and 11 other senior justices.

What actually makes people astonished is the process of the bill making, which has been far from transparent. According to Indonesia Corruption Watch, the bill deliberations have never been attended by the public as required by the above law. This means transparency and public participation, two of the many good governance principles, have been ignored.

One may remember the latest survey of Transparency International Indonesia (TII)'s Corruption Perception Index 2006. According to the survey, the judiciary topped other institutions in soliciting bribes (achieving a score of 100), followed by customs and immigration at 95 and 90, respectively.

When the quality of the Supreme Court is already as bad as shown in the survey, how will the newly and hastily passed Law on Supreme Court be?

If the bill was really passed with such criticized content, among other things endorsing the extension of senior justices' retirement age from 67 years to 70 years, the Supreme Court would be a place for oldies with meager spirit of reform and hamper regeneration.