The panel of three judges at the Central Jakarta District Court -- Saifuddin Zuhri, Duta Baskara and Tuty Haryati -- have postponed the ruling eight times in the past four months, the most recent being last Thursday when they pushed the schedule to Thursday this week.

The citizen lawsuit is the first of its kind aiming to hold authorities accountable for air pollution in the country. It was filed in July 2019 by 32 residents of Greater Jakarta against seven public officials: the President, the environment minister, the health minister, the home minister and the governors of Jakarta, Banten and West Java. The plaintiffs demanded they devised policies to improve air quality in Jakarta.

The ruling was originally scheduled for May 20 after plaintiffs and respondents presented their closing arguments on April 21. But this was postponed for two weeks, with judges saying that the documents from the plaintiffs and defendants for cross-examination were incomplete.

Ever since, the bench has continuously rescheduled the ruling on short notice for various reasons, according to the lawyers, from the death of a judge’s family member, a judge being infected with coronavirus to the judges needing extra time to read through all the documents they had received to reach a verdict.

The lawyers said the repeated delays showed how the judges were unprofessional in handling the case.

“It seems that the judges think that the right to clean air is not urgent. This is sad," one of the lawyers, Ayu Eza Tiara from the Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation (LBH Jakarta), said recently.