Rangga Prakoso – The National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) on Tuesday accused the Attorney General's Office of violating human rights in its handling of a bioremediation project graft case involving oil firm Chevron Indonesia.

Natalius Pigai, a commissioner with Komnas HAM, said that a probe of the case concluded that the AGO was guilty of four counts of human rights violations.

"We have ascertained that the Attorney General's Office's handling of the bioremediation project violated Article 39 of the 1999 Law on Human Rights," Natalius said.

According to the commissioner, the AGO failed to obtain legal certainty, prevent arbitrary arrests and detentions, deliver justice through a fair and honest legal process and secure the rights of those involved in an alleged civil case.

"All evidence of the violations are being drafted in a 400 page [report] that will be submitted to the president, the speaker of the House, House Commission III [which deals with legal affairs] and the Judicial Commission on Monday," he said.

Natalius also noted that there were 11 irregularities in the handling of the case.

For example, two pretrial verdicts which declared the detention of three Cheveron employees and the naming of Bachtiar Abdul Fatah, the general manager of Chevron Indonesia's Sumatra operations, as a suspect illegal were ignored.

A second irregularity was in declaring the suspects – who were all from lower management or the company level – to be guilty of a decision that was clearly not made at their level.

"If it is a large project, does it make any sense that it was [decided on] by lower management?" Natalius asked.

He added that the one who should be held accountable is Russel George Larsson, the infrastructure maintenance manager for CPI. Despite is willingness to be questioned, the attorney general's office has still not interrogated him. "Unequal legal treatment by the AGO tends towards legal discrimination," he said.

The Attorney General's Office has been pursuing this case since 2011 and named seven suspects in 2012, including five Chevron employees.

The case pertains to botched a project to clean up soil polluted by oil and gas operations. Bioremediation is a process that uses biological organisms to remove or neutralize pollutants.

In December 2012, the South Jakarta District Court ruled that the AGO had not obtained enough preliminary evidence against four Chevron officials accused in the case and ordered the AGO to drop the case and clear the suspects of all charges.

But the AGO's Setia said in January that the agency would not comply with the district court ruling, arguing that a copy of the verdict had not been sent to the AGO.

As a result, Setia said, the AGO had decided to press on with the case and had even completed the preparation of documents for the prosecution of Bachtiar as a suspect. Bactiar was forcibly arrested last month and is now under detention.

Ricksy Prematuri, the director of Green Planet Indonesia, one of the companies hired by Chevron Indonesia to carry out bioremediation projects on its behalf, was found guilty last month and was sentenced to five years in jail for causing more than $3 million in state losses.

The judge said that Green Planet was not certified by the Environment Ministry to provide the oil-field clean-up service it was being paid to carry out.

Chevron Indonesia has warned the nation's gas regulatory body, SKKMigas, that a deteriorating investment climate in Indonesia may lead to lower future investment by the company.