S

ince its birth almost 70 years ago, this nation has tirelessly promoted equality before the law; but the latest two cases of poor elderly persons being forced to stand trial for minor criminal charges show that sense of justice is missing entirely.

The arrest and trial of Asyani, 70, a woman from the East Java town of Situbondo, and Harso Taruno, 67, a man from Gunungkidul regency, Yogyakarta, for allegedly harvesting teakwood belonging to state forestry company PT Perhutani is a testament to strict, indiscriminate law enforcement, which is a must.

Indeed, nobody '€“ not public officials or ordinary citizens, old or young, rich or poor, man or woman '€“ should stand above the law in this country. But law enforcement here turns out to follow its own tragic logic: those who have access to money and power can defy, or even bend, the rules.

Unlike the defenseless Asyani and Harso (whose cases immediately received government attention only after persistent media coverage), certain businessmen convicted of stealing trillions of rupiah in state money manage to flee the country just before state prosecutors come to arrest them: The son of a top government official can escape prison after the car he drove killed people in a traffic accident; a heavyweight politician can evade criminal charges despite a defendant'€™s testimony against him; and a law enforcer can fight back and criminalize his arraigners.

Someone should explain why state prosecutors managed only to arrest a prominent convict five years after
the Supreme Court upheld a jail sentence handed down to him for assault. This is beyond our common sense to comprehend.

The rampant phenomenon of the '€œuntouchables'€, or '€œnearly untouchables'€, is an acute problem that has prevented the country'€™s justice system from working effectively. As critics have said, the law is strictly enforced against the weak, but leniently enforced against the powerful.

Such an allegation would have been confirmed had the government not backed down from its plan to relax a regulation that would allow corruption convicts to enjoy generous remissions. The plan not only ignored the public'€™s sense of justice, but also contradicted the national consensus that classifies corruption as an extraordinary crime.

As in the cases of Asyani and Harso, our law enforcers have considered the Criminal Code (KUHP) and the Criminal Law Procedure Code (KUHAP) holy books they dare not violate. They seem to follow the two codes to the letter in order to uphold the law, but this reduces law enforcement to a merely procedural matter, and the substance is lost in the process.

The will to uphold the law indeed is a requisite and all citizens must abide by the law as a result of the social contract. A law-abiding society warrants orderliness that will be attractive to foreign investors.

But because law is created to deliver justice for all, defying the sense of justice is a transgression of the law itself.