Draft Amendments to the Law on General Courts

This series of amendments has been proposed by the Legislation Agency of the DPR and these amendments reflect recent developments in judicial reform. A regular complaint of the Indonesian judiciary relates to its inconsistency in the decision making process and the frequent claims that justice is administered in favor of those who know best how to “tweak” the system.

A quick survey of judicial related news over the last 12 – 24 months highlights that the big issues of concern have been the manner in which general courts accept and administer cases, the court ‘mafia’, and the long-term stand-off between the Supreme Court and the State Audit Board with regard to the auditing of court or case fees. Each of these issues has been regulated in the Draft Bill.

The basic premise for the Bill is that there is a need for general courts to be seen as clean, accountable, transparent, and judicious in the provision of the court’s judicial, administrative, and financial functions. Furthermore, there is a need for greater supervision and discipline with respect to the behavior of judicial officers.

The Bill includes the insertion of five articles between Article 1 and Article 2, namely: 1A through 1E. In essence, these articles regulate that the general courts are based on the application of Pancasila, the involvement of external parties in case administration is prohibited, there is equality of the relevant parties before the law, the general courts may not refuse to hear matters, and there is to be full and equitable access to the courts.

Other interesting amendments to the Law see explicit reference that the Judicial Commission is responsible for the supervision of judges. However, this is clarified to state that the supervision must not impinge on the independence of judges to carry out their judicial functions of hearing and deciding cases.

The final amendment of note is that the Bill states unequivocally that general courts have a right to demand fees for the hearing of cases. The management and responsibility for this money would appear to require further regulation in a specific legal instrument for that purpose. However, the amendment leaves no doubt that the State Audit Board may audit these monies to ensure that the fees collected are not misused or abused.

It is not expected that these amendments will be subject to extensive debate as most of this debate has already been carried out in other public forums and the amendments appear to reflect the lowest common denominator that all stakeholders seem to be resigned to accepting.

The amendments will, if passed in this form, serve to strengthen the credibility of the general courts and the belief that judicial reform in Indonesia is a serious undertaking which has considerable support from the courts themselves.