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Found guilty of ethics breach, top court justice gets off with mere warning
Constitutional Court Justice Guntur Hamzag gets off with a warning over an ethics misconduct, setting off a wave of criticism.
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In the spotlight: Newly inaugurated Constitutional Court Justice Guntur Hamzah takes questions from the media at the State Palace on Nov. 23, 2022. Guntur replaced Aswanto, who was dismissed by the House of Representatives. (Antara/Hafidz Mubarak A)
T
he Constitutional Court’s ethics council on Monday found Justice Guntur Hamzah guilty of breaching the code of ethics by altering a court ruling challenging the dismissal of his predecessor without the knowledge of the other justices.
However, Guntur was let off with a warning from the council, setting off a wave of criticism.
The ethics council convened on Monday after concluding its examination of irregularities surrounding the top court’s ruling on the 2020 Constitutional Court Law, which governs the rights of the nine justices of the bench.
The council was formed on Jan. 30, led by former justice I Dewa Gede Palguna and accompanied by Constitutional Court Justice Enny Nurbaningsih and Sudjito, a law professor from Yogyakarta’s Gadjah Mada University, who was a member of a previous court ethics council.
The irregularities revolve around a discrepancy between the ruling that was read aloud in the final hearing and the official copy of it that was uploaded to the court’s website. It centers on the use of the term “therefore” in the court’s opinion, read out in November by Justice Saldi Isra, which differed from the phrase “in the future” that appeared in the subsequent official copy of the ruling online.
According to the hearing on Monday, the ethics council found that Guntur had crossed out the word “therefore” and replaced it with “in the future”, communicating this change with court clerk Muhidin at 3:24 p.m., only four minutes before Saldi began reading the court’s opinion.
Muhidin told Justice Arief Hidayat about the proposed change in the ruling but not the other justices on the bench, including Saldi, who was the final drafter of the ruling.
