T

he Judicial Commission (KY) and Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University (UGM) have signed an agreement to cooperate in the monitoring of trial processes in courts through the students’ national study service scheme (KKN) activities. The cooperation was signed on Tuesday by UGM rector Pratikno and KY chairman Eman Suparman at the university’s school of law.

“UGM is ready to work together with the Judicial Commission and the community to control the trial processes,” Pratikno said in his speech at the signing ceremony.

The cooperation will last for two years and will be managed by the university’s Center for Anticorruption Studies (Pukat). Through the program, students in their KKN assignment will be tasked with assisting the KY to monitor trials in courts and empower the community on how to monitor trials themselves.

Pratikno said that the program could strengthen people’s capacity in monitoring the process of a trial in courts. “With this type of KKN, we are creating millions of Judicial Commissions in villages,” he said.

KKN, according to Pratikno, has until recently been a UGM icon, whose success as a community-based learning system has been acknowledged by various universities abroad.

Eman Suparman said that in monitoring a trial, it was not just the judges who were monitored, but also the lawyers working on the trial. This, he said, was due to the fact that many lawyers would try to bribe the judges to win a case they represented. “Lawyers need to win their cases. Otherwise, no one will hire them,” Eman said.

Separately, a member of KY, Suparman Marzuki, who oversees judge surveillance and investigation said that the thematic KKN would be of great help for the commission, especially in dealing with limited human resources. Providing an example, he said that his division alone ideally needed 70 staff. Yet, it only has 11 of them. “This KKN program really fits with the problems that the KY is facing,” he said.

Things that need to be monitored in a trial, he said, include observing whether the judges, for example, were distracted, busy using their cell phones, whether they used rude words during the trial, or whether the process of the trial was conducted according to the prevailing procedures.

Zainal Arifin of Pukat provided assurance that the program, which would be conducted twice a year with a two-month duration for each batch of students, would provide a big impact on the practice of mafias being involved in trials in the country. “They [the mafia] will have to ‘fast’ because they will have limited movements due to these monitoring activities,” he said.

He expressed hope that the same program would also be implemented by other universities. If students from all of the country’s 33 provinces conducted the same monitoring activities, they would create hope for better trial processes in Indonesia, he said.

“Even in Java Island where surveillance is relatively tight, weird things often occur in trials in court, much less outside Java where it can be said that control is not that tight,” he said.