The Supreme Court will form new corruption courts in three provinces – West Java, Central Java and East Java – this month, but doubts linger over whether the local tribunals can boost the fight against corruption.
The 2009 Corruption Court law ordered the establishment of corruption courts in 33 provinces within two years of its enactment. The law was endorsed after the Constitutional Court in 2006 ruled that the creation of the sole corruption court in Jakarta under the 2002 law, which also established the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), was unconstitutional.
The 2009 law stipulates that a corruption court will specially try graft cases submitted by the KPK or the Attorney General's Office, unlike the current system in which cases handled by the AGO are sent to the general courts. This, according to the Constitutional Court, created a "duality" in the judiciary and caused "legal uncertainty" for graft defendants.
Asep Rahmat Fajar from the Indonesian Legal Roundtable said he doubted the local corruption courts would boost anticorruption efforts, saying the "old habits" of bribery would still derail graft prosecution at the regional level.
"I am concerned about the quality of the ad hoc judges who will serve at the local corruption courts because there is no adequate monitoring system in the selection processes," Asep told The Jakarta Post over the weekend.
The Supreme Court has selected 82 ad hoc judges – a dismal number considering it is required to select a total of at least 240 judges to serve at the regional corruption courts. The selected judges will be posted in Semarang, Surabaya, Bandung, Samarinda, Medan, Makassar and Palembang. Only the first three cities are ready to begin hearing corruption cases this month.
Supreme Court spokesman Andri Tristianto dismissed Asep's allegation, claiming the selection process had been transparent. "These judges will undergo training first on Dec. 6 until 11 in Bogor."
But the lack of quality judges is not the only problem. Asep also questioned whether the KPK would have enough human resources to conduct operations in the regions.
The commission's deputy chief, Mochammad Jasin, concurred with Asep, saying that his office needed more prosecutors to do its jobs. "We are running short of prosecutors. We will ask the AGO for additional ones," Jasin told the Post.
Since its conception, the commission has hired 90 investigators from the police, 30 to 40 from the AGO and 40 to 50 from the State Development Finance Comptroller (BPKP). Nevertheless, Jasin said, he was upbeat there would be no major glitches once the KPK began to prosecute cases in the regions.
"The commission will still conduct investigations with commands from Jakarta. As usual, we could deploy investigators to any place in the country," he said, adding that the commission was considering establishing local offices.
The new courts will be established in the courtrooms of the District Courts in the three provinces. The local prosecutor's offices will temporarily provide KPK prosecutors offices in their buildings.
The 2002 KPK law stipulates the commission's nationwide authority, in which it also has rights to install provincial representative offices, but it does not regulate a time limit to establish them.
Asep said a lack of monitoring systems in the local courts would impede the KPK, which would also likely face greater pressure in the region where mass rallies often disrupted corruption trials.
But Jasin differed, saying the corruption courts would apply a monitoring system used in Jakarta's corruption court and the police would safeguard the trials in the region. "We will install video cameras in the courts so that we will know if there is a defendant who is pretending to be ill," he said. (ipa)