Rizky Amelia – The chairman of the country's anticorruption commission spoke on Thursday of the need to take stock of antigraft courts in the regions following recent acquittals in cases they handled.
"This needs to be evaluated first, from the management angle, and this should not be delayed," Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) chairman Busyro Muqoddas said.
The review, Busyro said, should be conducted by the Supreme Court as the institution overseeing the judges.
"The Supreme Court has the obligation to conduct the evaluation," he said. "It can do that by itself, but it would be much better if it coordinated with the Judicial Commission."
He also said that other institutions, such as universities and antigraft watchdog Indonesia Corruption Watch, should also be involved because they had experts in the field.
While KPK prosecutors boast a nearly 100 percent record of successful prosecutions in the Anti-Corruption Court in Jakarta, the case is different in the rest of the nation, where acquittals of graft suspects are the norm.
In the latest case, an antigraft court in Samarinda, East Kalimantan, acquitted four of the 15 graft defendants on Oct. 1 in a case of embezzlement of operation funds of the Kutai Kartanegara district budget worth Rp 2.98 billion ($334,000).
The four acquitted were all suspended district councilors. An antigraft court in Bandung recently acquitted the suspended mayor of Bekasi, even though other courts had already found his underlings guilty of corruption in related cases.
Under the current anticorruption law, antigraft courts must be set up in each district and municipality. Critics, however, have pointed out that the integrity of the courts relies heavily on the quality of its judges and that the credibility of judges in general is low in the public eye.
Busyro also said that the withdrawal of a draft revision of the 1999 Law on Corruption Eradication from the hands of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono came at the behest of the KPK.
Justice and Human Rights Minister Amir Syamsuddin announced on Tuesday that his ministry had withdrawn the draft bill in order to review and strengthen it.
The bill was in the last stage before going to the House of Representatives for deliberation, but Busyro said there were still several points of contention that needed to be addressed.
"For example, the matter of capital punishment and standard clauses on social sanctions," Busyro said.
The KPK also objected to the clause that defined cases of corruption able to be investigated as only those involving at least Rp 25 million.
"If this restriction is not eliminated, there could be corruption involving just Rp 5 million time and time again," he said. "That would be demoralizing."
The new draft also made possible weaker punishments for those found guilty of bribing law enforcers and the criminalization of whistleblowers in corruption cases. Furthermore, the KPK's authority in indicting corruption suspects was unclear.
Meanwhile, Muhammad Yusuf, chairman of the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Center (PPATK), on Thursday encouraged the KPK to also use the money-laundering law to deal with corruption cases.
Yusuf said the law provided for various actions that could be used to prosecute both money-launderers and recipients.