In search of a less politicized recruitment system Pandaya   ;  A Staff Writer at The Jakarta Post

                                                JAKARTA POST,  09 Februari 2014                

                                                                                                                        

                                                                                         

                                                      

Last month’s Constitutional Court ruling which limited the House of Representatives’ authority in the selection of Supreme Court justices raised high hopes for less political gaming in the recruitment of state officials and an improved government bureaucracy. The ruling is basically an amendment to the 2004 Law on the Judicial Commission. The law gave the commission the authority to select a list of justice candidates to be proposed to the House from which legislators could make their choices.  The commission would select three candidates for each vacant justice position. So to fill three vacancies, the commission should come up with nine nominees for the House. The Constitutional Court’s ruling requires that the commission propose one candidate for each vacant position and for the House to simply accept or reject the candidate. The much-lauded ruling, made in favor of a judicial review filed by three candidates who failed the selection process at the House last year, was the Constitutional Court’s first major ruling since former court chief justice Akil Mochtar was arrested for graft. It quickly won public support because it would empower the commission, which has been dismissed as a paper tiger because despite being an oversight body it does not have the authority to take legal measures against recalcitrant judges.  However, the ruling received a negative response from lawmakers as it reduces their role in picking state officials, a political privilege it has enjoyed since the reformasi (reformation) era when the legislature obtained formidable power.  So their bizarre rejection of all the Judicial Commission’s three justice candidates on Tuesday has been widely interpreted as a signal of the House’s displeasure at the court’s ruling. It sparked fears of conflict among the court, the commission and the House that could stall the recruitment of justices.  Until 1985, the recruitment of justices was a simple procedure. Candidates were proposed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court for the president to endorse without lawmakers’ involvement.  In the course of time political power shifted from the president to the House and legislators had a major say in the recruitment of state officials.  So powerful are the lawmakers now that they have the final say in the leadership selection of vital institutions such as the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM), the Broadcasting Commission, the Supreme Audit Agency (BPK), Bank Indonesia, the National Police, the military and even the Judicial Commission itself.  Obviously, as representatives of political parties, legislators have a high degree of conflict of interest, especially these days when so many of them are arraigned in the dock for corruption.  The Constitutional Court ruling is expected to pave the way for the selection of senior state officials with minimum intervention from lawmakers.  Not only do the legislators have conflicts of interest and have trampled on the principle of an independent justice system, their role has also given rise to suspicions about rampant money politics.  The House’s rejection of the justice candidates — Suhardjono of the Makassar High Court; Maria Anna Samiyati, deputy at the Palu High Court in Central Sulawesi and Sunarto, a member of the Supreme Court’s monitoring unit — without adequate transparent reasoning has made the public expectation of an improved recruitment system appear unrealistic. Pieter Zulkifli, chairman of House Commission III, which oversees judicial selection at the legislature, said: “Those attending the selection process last week would agree that the candidates the Judicial Commission proposed to us were very disappointing. Moreover, they had proposed the three before and we had rejected them.” The judicial commissioners countered that although none of the candidates was perfect, it took six months and Rp 3 billion (US$ 246,000) in tax payers’ money to select them and they had a good grasp of their jobs and — most importantly — had the highest integrity among all the 60 nominees they had short-listed. “The selection process at the House was simply too simplistic in having concluded that the [three] candidates were unqualified,” said Judicial Commission chief Suparman Marzuki.  Now the Judicial Commission has to go back to square one and has to review the long list of applicants it had already short-listed.  Although we should neither blindly believe everything that Suparman claims about his candidates, we would hope that to ensure transparency the House will publish the standards and qualifications they require from state official candidates for the public to scrutinize. The obviously brewing rivalries among the House, the Constitutional Court and the Judicial Commission are deleterious especially to the recruitment of competent justices of unwavering integrity. A more acceptable recruitment method should be designed to break the impasse. ●