Ismira Lutfia – Attorney General Basrief Arief admitted on Tuesday that a lack of political will was hindering the processing of cases involving human rights violations.
Speaking at a regional seminar on the prosecution of human rights violators in Asia, Basrief said the lack of will was reflected in the vagueness of the mechanism for the formation of ad hoc human rights courts, which are institutions set up to investigate a particular event.
Basrief said that a 2000 law on such courts, which can only be established by presidential decree following a recommendation from the House of Representatives, does not properly describe the role of the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) in the process.
"The experience in the Trisakti [University] and Semanggi cases," said Basrief, referring to the fatal shootings of students during the protests of 1998, "showed that the pattern of working relations between the House of Representatives and Komnas HAM is unclear.
"At the same time, both institutions conducted their own investigations on the same cases." He added that officials of ad hoc courts still had a hard time ensuring transparent and accountable human rights trials.
For the sake of transparency, the appointment of such officials should involve the public, he said. Some technical and legal constraints, however, made this difficult, he said without elaborating.
"The proper usage of ad hoc human rights courts continues to be elusive for handling cases of violations which should be retroactive in nature," Basrief said.
Mugiyanto, a pro-democracy activist who said that in 1998 he was abducted by security forces, said that ratifying the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court would help Indonesia shore up its weaknesses in prosecuting serious human rights violations.
Becoming party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC when it entered into force in 2002, would extend the ICC's jurisdiction to Indonesia. The purpose of the ICC is to investigate and prosecute serious human rights crimes in situations where states are unable or unwilling to do so themselves.
According to Mugiyanto, a 2006 law on human rights courts has plenty of loopholes that allow violators to remain unpunished. "Trying violators of human rights provides an important meaning, a recognition of the mistake done," Mugiyanto said.
Indonesia's ad hoc human rights courts so far have failed both to give justice to victims and deter future violations, he said. "This has meant that the stated aim of such courts has failed to materialize," said Mugiyanto, who also chairs the Indonesian Association of Families of the Disappeared (Ikohi).
Since human rights courts were not independent, Mugianto said, to strengthen them the country needed to ratify the Rome Statute. Although such an action would not automatically improve conditions, it would at least be a step away from impunity for human rights violators.
Mugiyanto said that Indonesia was among 17 Asian countries that had not ratified the Rome Statute.
Indonesia has a checkered history of human rights abuses, stretching back to the colonial rule of the Dutch and later the Japanese. Early the three-decade rule of strongman President Suharto, half a million people are believed to have been killed. Indonesian military officers were accused of significant abuses in the province of East Timor prior to its independence in the late 1990s.