A

s corruption cases pile up at the Jakarta Corruption Court, the Supreme Court has started a quick-selection process to recruit new ad hoc judges, raising concerns about the quality of the chosen candidates.

Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) said on Thursday that its monitoring team had found that none of the 58 candidates met the integrity, competency and independence criteria set by the NGO.

The Supreme Court, which on Thursday interviewed the 58 candidates in Bogor, West Java, is slated to announce the selected ad hoc judges on Friday.

The selection process was launched by the Supreme Court to meet the Jakarta Corruption Court'€™s urgent need for ad hoc judges to assess the increasing number of cases investigated by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and the Attorney General'€™s Office (AGO). The KPK alone is currently processing 40 cases, including some that have entered the trial stage.

ICW also found that seven of the 58 hopefuls had links to political parties, a situation that could compromise their tasks in the future.

ICW researcher Aradila Ceasar said the antigraft NGO would not reveal the names of the seven judges, but its monitoring team had submitted its findings to the Supreme Court for a follow-up, so that they would not be chosen by the selection panel at the court.

'€œWe urge the panel not to select candidates who do not meet the necessary criteria set by the Supreme Court. If the team finds that none of the candidates meet the criteria, then it is better to open another selection process to look for better candidates,'€ Aradila told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.

Aradila further said that going ahead selecting candidates who did not have a good track record would compromise the country'€™s anticorruption fight by the KPK and the AGO.

'€œKeep in mind that if corruption cases are examined by ad hoc judges who lack independence and have poor track records, they will produces questionable rulings in the future that could weaken the graft fight,'€ Aradila added.

An ad hoc judge by definition is a judge who has special knowledge on a specific field, and as a special court the Jakarta Corruption Court needs to have ad hoc judges to collaborate with career judges at the court to examine corruption cases that involve fields such as banking, energy and others.

The shortage of ad hoc judges has forced the Jakarta Corruption Court to reschedule and postpone a number of hearings. Some recent hearings even had to be supervised by three judges, rather than the usual five, after some of its ad hoc judges had resigned from their posts.

Jakarta Corruption Court spokesman Sutio Jumagi said three of the current eight ad hoc judges at the court had resigned and retired from their posts, adding that the court had earlier received three new ad hoc judges from the Supreme Court, but they were not ready for deployment yet, as they still had to undergo a number of training courses. '€œTwo are from Surabaya and one is from Banten,'€ Sutio said.

In addition to the shortage, ad hoc judge Alexander Marwata, who is notorious for controversial arguments to defend graft suspects in final rulings, is currently being nominated as a candidate for the KPK commissioner job.

If the House of Representatives accepts him for the job in December, the shortage of ad hoc judges at the Jakarta Corruption Court will only get worse.

It remains unclear how many ad hoc judge candidates will pass the selection process at the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court also did not disclose how many judges it plans to pick from the process.

Supreme Court spokesman Suhadi said the selection process in Bogor was open for the public to ensure that the process could be supervised directly by members of the public, including NGOs.

'€œThe selection team will announce the results. The selected candidates will be determined based on psychological tests and interviews,'€ Suhadi said, as quoted by kompas.com on Thursday.