Borobudur Law and Society Journal

In Decision No 005/PUU-IV/2006 the Constitutional Court removed its own judges from the ethical supervision of the Judicial Commission, leaving them to an internal Honour Council. The decision has been widely criticised, but the criticism has rarely been tested against the record of internal supervision since then. This study asks whether the Court’s reasoning was sound and what model of supervision the record of 2006–2023 supports. It is normative research using statutory, case and conceptual approaches to the 1945 Constitution, the Judicial Commission and Constitutional Court Laws and their amendments, the 2006 decision and later decisions of the Court and its Honour Council. The Court’s argument that its judges are not ‘judges’ under Article 24B(1) is weak, but its concern for its impartiality in disputes involving the Commission is real. The later record shows that internal supervision did not prevent two judges from being convicted of corruption, that the Court twice struck down legislative attempts to add external members, and that an Honour Council with outside members was able, in 2023, to remove the Chief Justice from office for a serious ethical violation. The ethics of Constitutional Court judges should therefore be supervised by a permanent, statutory Honour Council with a majority of members from outside the Court and binding powers of sanction.