PERADI (the Indonesian Bar Association) held a two-day litigation seminar last week (15 & 16 April 2015), covering civil procedure and effective dispute strategies.
One topic of discussion was the tendency of the Courts to dismiss cases on technical grounds rather than deal with substantive issues. Powers of Attorney, jurisdiction of Courts, and parties to proceedings are commonly attacked by defence attorneys, and are sometimes the subject of decisions to dismiss cases on procedural grounds. Of great concern is that the Courts have not been consistently applying the law on these points, have sometimes applied the law incorrectly, and have not given parties reasonable chances to remedy administrative problems.
One explanation for why this might be happening is that Judges are said to be dealing with increasingly heavy case loads. Dealing with cases in this way may help Courts get through their caseload more efficiently in the short term, but does not necessarily produce a just decision and may create more work in the long term as the system ends up dealing with appeals.