Sunday, December 21, 2008

The Supreme Court Law


The Life Expectancy of an Average Indonesian person has increased from 65 to 70 years old!
That’s what I thought when I heard that our Parliament: the People’s Representative Council (DPR) last Thursday passed the Amendment of the Supreme Court Law No.5 Year 2004, raising the age of a Supreme Judge from 67 to 70 years old.

However, in stead of being happy I felt very sad about the increase in age of those Judges, because it means that younger Judges would be obstructed from becoming a Supreme Judge, and the Supreme Court would be dominated by Old Men and Women, therefore their performance would not improve: slow processing of Cassation cases, long pending Cassation cases, lack of transparency, etc.
Unsurprisingly, my thoughts are shared by Politicians, the Indonesian Corruption Watch and Law Academicians. In this case, Kompas, Tempo, Suara Merdeka, quoted them as saying that the DPR’s decision to pass said Law has not been carried out according to DPR’s own regulation, i.e., only 63 of the 500 members attended the meeting session, and two Political parties do not agree with the increase of age, they said that the maximum age should either be 65 or 67 years old. Further they demand the passing of said Law should await the passing of the Law regarding the Judicial Commission Law which is still being processed.

Now that that the glass of milk has fell down to the floor, there is no use to worry about the spilled milk. The best thing that we can do is to monitor how those Supreme Judges perform within a sufficient period of time, let's say 12 months. If they do not show any improvement, then we can start to voice our protests once again.

Pic:Metallica

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for visiting my site and I wanted to return to your site to make a comment on your last posting. At last, someone who agrees with me, I am in the age group that you refer too. I am active and want to believe that my faculties remain intact. However, you are right about Supreme Court Judges being dominated by old men and women. The U.S. Supreme Court Judges are mostly in the upper age bracket and are allowed to remain in that post “for a lifetime”. I believe that older persons should step aside and allow the new ideas of the younger people to bring “new blood” into our systems. I retired to begin a new career, but to allow someone to take my position that deserved it; I mentored a younger person for four years. When I left, I hired him into my position and gave him a chance to grow within the company, and to bring a higher income into his young families’ home. This idea of allowing our youth to bring new and innovative ideas to the front should be a Universal thought process. Thank you for this article, good work.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for your return visit. I really appreciate it. I am very glad that we both shared the same opinion. I'll come more often to your beautiful blog where I can learn a lot.