Jakarta. The Indonesian government has stepped in amid a fundamental difference of opinion between the two highest courts in the land over how many case reviews a convict can request after exhausting all other avenues of appeal.
The Justice Ministry will issue a government regulation that will “find a middle path” in the debate engendered by the conflicting stances of the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Court, Minister Yasonna Laoly said in Jakarta on Friday.
“Hopefully we can agree that there won’t be a difference of opinion like we’re seeing today, at least not between different institutions,” he said.
The Constitutional Court ruled in 2013 that an article in the Criminal Code Procedures restricting convicts to just one case review — a post-appeal motion filed with the Supreme Court after it has already issued a final and binding ruling in their case — was unconstitutional, and struck it from the statutes, effectively permitting convicts an unlimited number of case reviews.
On the last day of 2014, however, the Supreme Court issued a letter to all lower courts, the Attorney General’s Office and the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) — which prosecutes cases at anti-corruption courts — instructing them to reject all case reviews by death row inmates who had exhausted all avenues of appeal.
Yasonna said that pending the issuance of the government decree, no new case reviews would be granted, but those already underway would be allowed to proceed.
He denied that the government, which has made clear its intention to execute all 64 death-row inmates in Indonesia, was flouting the Constitutional Court’s ruling. Instead, he said the ruling had caused a “vacuum” in the legal process — by allowing unlimited case reviews — that needed to be filled to ensure legal certainty.
Source: The Jakarta Globe, January 9, 2015
