161. Judicial commission

Indonesia, the fourth most populous country in the world, is also one of the most corrupt, according to Transparency International, whose 2005 Corruption Perception Index ranks it 137, behind Kyrgyzstan and Burundi, tied with Iraq, and only a notch ahead of such non-functional map splotches as Somalia and Sudan.

The infection has settled in Indonesia's judiciary, according to our new World Bank president, who told us last spring that "corruption of its judicial system is one of the largest challenges Indonesia faces in attracting more investment."  An Indonesian legislator advised the chairman of the Supreme Court to concentrate on eradicating the "judicial mafia."  And an anti-corruption campaigner suggested that "the level of corruption in the judicial system was so high that it could 'no longer be supervised'".

The head of the Indonesian Judicial Monitoring Society told a reporter for Asia Sentinel that "buying court verdicts has been a systematic and organized crime in the country's legal system. It involves people from the highest levels, such as high court judges, down to the lowest levels, such as administrative staff in the Supreme Court."

In an effort to combat judicial corruption, a 2001 constitutional amendment authorized the creation of a Judicial Commission, a body actually established only last year.   As described by the English-language Jakarta Post, "the commission is charged with supervising and scrutinizing court officials as part of efforts to clean up the country's notoriously graft-ridden judicial system."  The Commission quickly identified 130 problem judges.

But empires have a way of striking back, and the Supreme Court proposed legislation making it a criminal offense to "insult the dignity" of the Supreme Court.   Unwilling to wait for the legislative process, some members of the judiciary went to the police to file complaints against the Judicial Commission for "tarnishing their good names."  But that was penny-ante stuff, or rather press-release stuff.  In a secret meeting held at a hotel,  judges of the Supreme Court discussed their proposed course of action with greater frankness:

In a document leaked to Antara [News Agency], one of the eight justices attending the meeting Harifin A Tumpa reportedly said: "To solve this problem, we have to 'root them out'.  " Then justice Djoko Sarwoko, who is the Supreme Court spokesman, added, "... we'll have to liquidate the Judicial Commission."

And, by golly, they did it.  The Constitutional Court, a separate entity created by the same 2001 constitutional reforms, ruled in a suit brought by the Supreme Court judges that the statute creating the Judicial Commission was unconstitutional.  (Here's more detail.)  Are you surprised to learn that as part of its ruling, the Constitutional Court "also ruled that the Constitutional Court itself is not subject to Judicial Commission oversight"?

It all seems disgraceful and farcical in roughly equal measure.  But it should also sound just a little bit familiar.  When the Michigan Supreme Court issued its nearly-incoherent opinion condemning Geoffrey Feiger for his unkind remarks about the rear ends of three judges of the state Court of Appeals, it declared that the performance of judicial responsibilities

requires a process in which the public can have the highest sense of confidence, ...  one in which discourse is grounded in the traditional tools of the law - language, precedents, logic, and rational analysis and debate.  (See post 144.)

Never mind that the Michigan Supreme Court's own opinion was lacking any suggestion of any of those traditional tools of the law.  What the court was saying was that courts can only be criticized inside the court system.  You have a problem with the courts?  Tell it to the judge.  There is no judge but the judge, and the judge is his prophet.