Heru Andriyanto – Attorney General Basrief Arief says the jobs of prosecutors in all Indonesian courts should be centralized by his office, under his leadership, specifically the antigraft commission's prosecutors at the Anti-Corruption Court.
It is no secret that friction has long existed between the Attorney General's Office and the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), which sends its cases to the Anti-Corruption Court.
The dispute took a turn for the worse in 2008 when one AGO prosecutor was slapped with criminal charges by the KPK. Urip Tri Gunawan is serving a 20-year jail term over a bribery scandal. After seeing to the jailing of Urip, the KPK arrested and investigated prosecutor Dwi Seno Wijanarko.
A mid-ranking official from the Tangerang Prosecutors' Office's intelligence unit – which is overseen by the AGO – Dwi is in custody awaiting trial for allegedly blackmailing a banker.
With just one exception, the KPK has never lost a case at the Anti-Corruption Court. The AGO, in contrast, often draws controversy with its handling of major graft cases.
However, Basrief suggested on Friday that his feathers were not about to be ruffled by past controversies, saying that he was confident that prosecutors fighting cases at the Anti-Corruption Court could be trained exclusively by the AGO.
"According to the Criminal Procedural Code [Kuhap], prosecution is the sole responsibility of prosecutors. We recruit and train all prosecutors and they are installed by the attorney general," Basrief said.
He said all countries worldwide recognized the exclusive task of their AGO to prosecute cases in court.
Basrief asserted that KPK prosecutors were only authorized to prosecute graft cases because they were sent to work there by the AGO in the first place. "We would welcome it if [all prosecution tasks] are handed to us," he told reporters.
However, many high-profile graft suspects have been released by the AGO even before their trials began, including former minister Laksamana Sukardi, business tycoon Sjamsul Nursalim and Hutomo 'Tommy' Mandala Putra, the son of former President Suharto.
Humiliating scandals have also rocked the AGO in recent years, such as the controversial trial of disgraced tax official Gayus Tambunan.
The rivalry between the AGO and KPK culminated in 2009 when then KPK chairman Antasari Azhar was prosecuted for murder. Afterwards, two of his former deputies, Chandra M. Hamzah and Bibit Samad Rianto, were named suspects on abuse of power and extortion charges.
The case against the two deputies backfired for the AGO, with Constitutional Court Chief Mahfud M.D. saying there was a conspiracy by the AGO, the National Police and the court system overseen by the Supreme Court, to discredit the KPK.