According to The Jakarta Post, the Indonesian House is considering reforms to the Supreme Court law. One of the proposed reforms is particularly interesting: limiting litigants’ right of appeal. In recent years, the Supreme Court’s caseload has reached phenomenal levels, as high as 17,000 per year. Some of these are relatively minor cases requiring only per curium decisions, but still they bog the court down. As Ronald Rofiandri from the Center for Legal and Policy Studies (PSHK) noted, “Not all cases should be brought to the appellate court, for example, divorce cases.” Reducing the court’s workload could go a long way to ensuring that it spends the necessary time on the more important cases in its docket. It could also potentially reduce corruption by reducing rent-seeking opportunities (after all, fewer cases means fewer litigants to extort). In short, this could be one feasible reform that could lead to a dramatic improvement in Indonesia’s notorious judiciary.
Category Archives: indonesia
Limit justice to save justice
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Filed under indonesia, Supreme Court
Indonesia updates
Two bits of news came out today that throw up further questions about Indonesia’s legal system. Over a year ago, I mentioned a case in which an Indonesian woman, Slamet Yuwono, was sued for defamation after she’d posted negative comments on Facebook. At the time, she had won on appeal. However, now the Supreme Court has found her guilty and sentenced her to six months imprisonment. According to an interview in The Jakarta Post, her lawyer claimed:
Making a comment is everybody’s right… If that kind of regulation is implemented, there would be many Indonesians in jail because of negative comments on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
In other news, according to The Jakarta Post, President Yudhoyono issued a decree to temporarily suspend Imas Dianasari, judge allegedly caught accepting a bribe on June 30. Unilaterally suspending judges is, to say the least, an exceptional power, granted in response to concerns over the corruption in Indonesia’s judiciary. As far as I can recall, this is the first time under SBY’s administration Indonesia that the president suspended a judge (although I’m not sure on this point). It’ll be worth keeping an eye out to see how this power is used in the future.
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Filed under corruption, indonesia, libel
Friendship money
“Friendship money.” That’s the euphemism currently employed in Indonesia to describe Democratic Party legislator M. Nazaruddin’s “presents” to members of the Constitutional Court. According to The Jakarta Post, Nazaruddin gave court members S$120,000 (approximately $97,700). Constitutional Court secretary-general Janedri M. Gaffar testified before the House’s ethics council about the allegations and claimed the court returned the money (interestingly, he seems to claim there was “a receipt for the return of the money to Nazaruddin”, suggesting there was a paper trail).
As I’ve mentioned several times on this blog, corruption is nothing new in Indonesia’s judiciary. However, until recently the Constitutional Court had a fairly clean reputation. Now, even if the justices did indeed return the money and are cleared of ethics violations, the stain might last. As such, it’s worth pondering why politicians would bother to bribe the Constitutional Court at all. Many of the cases that come before the court concern relatively minor policy issues, which one exception: elections. For political elites, elections are perhaps the most important policy issue.
Thus, these allegations are interesting in light of recent proposals in the House to remove elections cases from the Court’s jurisdiction. Without elections cases, the Court will still have jurisdiction over several important policy areas, but ones that affect the political elite indirectly. Unfortunately, I don’t have the contacts within Indonesia’s legislature to test this theory, but it’s possible that removing elections from the Court’s jurisdiction was partly a commitment strategy to protect the Constitutional Court from corruption (a tad idealistic, I know, but not unheard of). Either way, it will be interesting to observe allegations of corruption against the Constitutional Court over the next few years and whether or not they abate after the reforms take hold.
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Filed under indonesia, Mahkamah Konstitusi
Maybe this is why?
Yesterday, I’d posted a report about new reforms (attacks?) on Indonesia’s Constitutional Court. Today, Mahkamah Konstitusi Chief Justice Mahfud M.D. made yet another very public and “politically incorrect” comment about the SBY administration. As reported by Jakarta Globe, he claimed:
The moral bankruptcy of the legal system is due to the static legal enforcement… The key is leadership. We often face the belief that the president shouldn’t be involved in law enforcement. But in my opinion, the president should be involved in law enforcement but not the court process. Law enforcement is, indeed, the president’s duty.
Basically, the judiciary is accusing SBY of a lack of leadership – harsh words from the Third branch.
Despite having just a five-year term, Chief Justice Mahfud has been quite outspoken and sometimes critical of the other branches of government. Some Indonesians seem to believe the House’s recent “reforms” to the Constitutional Court were a sort of retribution against an activist and outspoken court. On the other hand, if the House and president don’t like the chief justice, they only need to wait a few more years to replace him. How much of a role is personal politics playing? It’s always difficult to tell in these situations, but in Indonesia personal politics can never be entirely discounted.
Filed under indonesia, Mahkamah Konstitusi
Indonesia’s Incredible Shrinking Constitutional Court(?)
Last week, murmurs came out of Indonesia that the House of Representatives had agreed on a bill that would significantly revise the powers and role of the Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi). Now, Jakarta Globe reports that the House passed the bill.
Two things stand out. First, the House is warning the court not to go beyond its mandate. In particular, several representatives expressed concern that the Court sometimes “clarified” laws without expressly ruling them unconstitutional. This practice, which Simon Butt calls “conditional constitutionality,“had allowed the justices to make statements about the law’s constitutionality more broadly without finding unconstitutionality in the particular case at hand. Now the Court seems like it will be forced to rule one way or the other.
The second major change is that the Court’s role in overseeing and adjudicating elections disputes has been all but eliminated. Some legislators – perhaps not surprisingly – complained when the Court overturned elections results. Jakarta Globe mentioned the possibility of a new elections court, but so far I haven’t seen any more details on that.
The final major provision, nominally less controversial, requires all justices to possess at least a Masters in law and be between 47-65 years old when they join the bench.
Are these changes designed to weaken the Constitution Court? In a sense, it’s hard to escape that conclusion as the House bill will strip away much of the Court’s jurisdiction. However, I’d also heard criticism that the Constitutional Court had become bogged down in election cases. Of course, election cases are potentially the most dangerous to the political elite of an electoral democracy. Therefore, perhaps removing election cases to a separate court will permit smoother relations between the political elite and Constitutional Court? I can’t predict the future, but it’s that same logic which allows courts in some authoritarian regimes to survive – reduce the threat, and allow independence.
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Filed under constitutional review, indonesia, Mahkamah Konstitusi
Dominic J. Nardi, Jr. 
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