Rebuilding the Judiciary in Indonesia : The Special Courts Strategy

Abstract

One reform strategy to improve judicial performance has been to establish special courts.While hailed by some'as an effective tool, others have pointed at the dangers to 'sidestep' the general judiciary in this manner.Indonesia provides an interesting case to examin'e these claims as in probably no other country have those seeking to reform the judiciary invested so much in special courts.The present paper evaluates the performance of some of Indonesia's special courts.Its main focus is the administrative courts, as the oldest and most 'trialled' of the list.It identifies to what extent the special court nature has been relevant to their peiformance and on this basis formulates four theses.These are then tested from the experiences with two other special courts: the tax courts and the commercial courts.In the conclusion these finding;; are summarily related to data of the other special courts.The analysis will demonstrate that it depends on the conditions under which special courts evolve whether they can actually contribute in a positive manner to judicial peJjormance.On the one hand serious problems with access and jurisdiction are associated with some of them, but on the other these courts perform relatively well on political independence and expertise.Carejitlly considered and introduced, specialisation of courts may be beneficial indeed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 35 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.