D

espite their agreement on the integrity of ad-hoc judges at the Corruption Court, legal practitioners and right activists were opposed on how these judges should be treated in the country's legal system.

Chairman of the Indonesian Advocates Association (Peradi), Otto Hasibuan, said the current administration should end the term of these ad-hoc judges and focus on improving the quality of career judges.

"These ad-hoc judges are not meant to replace those career ones for good," he said Friday.

Meanwhile, Indonesian Bar Association (Ikadin) chairman Luhut Pangaribuan said the current legal system accommodating ad-hoc judges must be refurbished.

"I support ad-hoc judges in spirit, meaning that we are indeed in great need of judges with high standard of integrity. However, I must acknowledge what we have implemented with ad-hoc judges is not that right."

Luhut proposed the creation of a new system that would allow only judges with integrity to conduct hearings in this country.

"The judges could come from various backgrounds later on.

"Various background knowledge would be useful if later on the panel should conduct hearings regarding sophisticated cases such as those on the oil and gas and stock market."

Luhut said many countries in Europe had adopted similar system where judges with various backgrounds were allowed to practice.

Otto and Luhut was speaking on the sidelines of a discussion held by Ikadin.

In Indonesia, ad-hoc judges could be spotted at the graft court. Usually from five judges in the panel, three of them are ad-hoc judges. These judges are usually legal experts who are practicing outside the court.

These ad-hoc judges have shown promising performance as they always managed to issue maximum rulings to graft defendants. In 2008, 31 graft case defendants were sent to jail by the Corruption Court.

However, recently the Supreme Court has thrown an idea to replace ad-hoc judges with career ones as it was thought that the current legal system does not actually allow the presence of ad-hoc judges.

Separately, Secretary General of the Transparency International Indonesia (TII), Teten Masduki said the administration should replace as many career judges as possible.

He said the replacements should be made because there had been public distrust toward career judges.

"It would be more conducive if the Supreme Court could be forced to replace those career judges with new ones as we can no longer trust these career judges."

Febri Diansyah of the Indonesian Corruption Watch (ICW) said, there was no need to start the discussion on whether to maintain ad-hoc judges or not as the country still needed them.