Friday, October 17, 2008

New blood for Supreme Court

The age limits our ability to think and do things, that is an undeniable facts.
It is for this reason that employers make retirement plans for their employees.
With this way of thinking on their mind, the Parliament (DPR) has selected 6 candidates to replace 6 existing Supreme Court Judges who has reached or even passed the retirement age of 65 years old. According to Kompas after having tested 18 candidates, the 3rd Committee of the DPR considered all of them poorly meets the standard requirements. The 6 were selected because they are slightly better than the other 12. The Head of the 3rd Comittee Trimedya Pandjaitan stated that the Judicial Commission should have conducted more careful selection before the candidates were presented to the DPR, and they should pay careful attention on the age of the candidates. One of them i.e. Djafni Djamal is 63 years old, whereas the retirement age is 65 years old. The selected candidates are: Suwardi (Deputy Chief of the Jakarta High Court), Djafni Djamal (Deputy Chief of West Sumatera High Court), Mahdi S. Nasution (Deputy Chief of Riau High Court), Syamsul Maarif (Head of the KPPU/Commission for Supervision of Business Competition), Tahdir Rahmadi (Lecturer at the Andalas University) and Andi A. Saleh (Lecturer at the Hasanuddin University).

Considering the above fact and current public concern over the performance of the Supreme Court, I felt that it is not easy to select the candidates, therefore we cannot blame the Judicial Commission for not providing DPR with better candidates. Now that they have been selected, it is much better for the DPR to make sure those candidates are fully committed to do their duties only for the interests of the state and nation of Indonesia. Perhaps by asking them to make the commitments in writing, mentioning time frame and consequence of failure.

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