Ary Hermawan, Jakarta – There must be nothing more bitter than feeling you have been victimized, especially when you were supposedly working for the greater good. That must have been the feeling among the General Elections Commission (KPU) members jailed for corruption by the Corruption Court.

Amid a waning of trust in the government's effort to eradicate corruption, in August members and former members of the national poll body, mostly academics, filed a request with the Constitutional Court for a judicial review of the 2002 law that established the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and the Corruption Court.

Chusnul Mariyah and Valina Singka Subekti – neither of whom were charged – joined their convicted colleagues Nazaruddin Syamsuddin and Daan Dimara in filing for the review.

Former KPU secretary-general Safder Yusacc, former KPU finance bureau head Hamdani Amin, who died in prison this December, and KPU general bureau head Bambang Budiarto also signed the request.

KPU member Mulyana Wira Kusumah, who has been convicted of corruption twice by the Corruption Court, filed a separate request for a judicial review. He has also challenged the KPK's authority to conduct wiretapping – which led to his conviction.

The poll body members maintained the creation of the Corruption Court under the same law that also set up the Corruption Eradication Commission was unconstitutional. By establishing the court through the KPK law, they argued, the government had given judicial as well as executive power to the body.

Thus, they said, anyone investigated and charged by the KPK could never escape prosecution. And the body was not given the authority to decide to halt an investigation. With such great powers, they said the KPK could be dangerous if it were controlled by corrupt parties.

The poll body members said their lawsuit was an effort to ensure the anti-graft drive did not turn into a witch-hunt that violated the constitutional and civil rights of individuals. But to activists, the judicial review was seen as an attack on the fledgling anti-corruption drive.

The Constitutional Court had earlier granted a request filed by the Indonesian Legal Society and a graft suspect, Dawud Djatmiko, to cancel a passage of the 1999 law on corruption. The court ruled graft suspects could only be taken to court for corruption if they were suspected of violating formal regulations such as presidential decrees or the Criminal Code, and not for violating societal norms, such as the principle of fairness.

Eleven legal experts gathered in Yogyakarta to study the petitions for judicial reviews of the KPK law. Apart from requests to scrap its authority to conduct wiretapping, there was also a request for the Constitutional Court to strike down the law on the Corruption Eradication Commission and the Corruption Court.

On Dec. 19, 10 days before the anniversary of the Corruption Eradication Commission, the Constitutional Court issued its ruling on the judicial reviews. It stated that the Corruption Court was unconstitutional because it caused a duality in the judiciary.

The establishment of the Corruption Court by the government was a double standard in the fight against corruption, Constitutional Court chief Jimly Ashsiddiqie said.

But to ensure continued efforts to fight graft, the Constitutional Court decided not to make its ruling effective immediately, giving the government three years to draft a special law on a new anti-graft body before the old Corruption Court was dissolved.

This has led to confusion and criticism from legal experts.

The Constitutional Court, according to the experts, has no legal basis for postponing the implementation of its ruling by three years.

Lawyer Adnan Buyung Nasution and National Resilience Institute Governor Muladi criticized the ruling and urged the government to disband the Corruption Court immediately or legalize it.

The government has said it will respond to the court's ruling as swiftly as possible, and stressed it would not hamper the anti-graft campaign.

Despite the controversy over whether the Constitutional Court's ruling will cripple the anti-graft body, the ruling has highlighted allegations that the government has been discriminatory in its fight against corruption, focusing on certain parties while ignoring those involved in some of the biggest graft cases.

Mulyana and Nazaruddin, a criminologist and a political scholar, respectively, as well as former fisheries and maritime affairs minister Rokhmin Dahuri, a professor at the Bogor Institute of Agriculture (IPB), were all lecturers without records as corrupt politicians.

They may have been found to be engaged in corruption, but those who have been involved in repeated acts of corruption, made possible by powerful connections, remain free.

The state suffered more than Rp 150 billion (about US$16 billion) in losses in the Bank Indonesia liquidity funds case, not to mention the case of former president Soeharto, who is alleged to have enriched himself, his family and cronies at great cost to the state. The fact that only relatively minor corruption cases have ever been taken to court has led to a loss of trust in the government's ability and willingness to fight graft.

In an apparent bid to demonstrate its toughness, the Attorney General's Office recently started releasing a weekly list of the most wanted corruption fugitives.

The Constitutional Court's latest ruling creates the possibility for either an improvement or the abandonment of the anti-graft drive, depending on the government's commitment.

On the positive side, allegations of discrimination would disappear if all cases were tried by an ad hoc corruption tribunals. But that would mean the government would have to work extra hard to establish the necessary infrastructure, especially in the regions, to enable the tribunals to handle all cases filed by the Attorney General's Office and the Corruption Eradication Commission.

But fears are that given the pervasiveness of corruption across the nation, corruption tribunals in the regions would be at risk of bribery, due to lax supervision and imperfect infrastructure. And that would be a substantial setback in the fight against graft. The government and lawmakers will have to be extremely prudent in drafting an effective law on the establishment of graft bodies, to avoid providing any ground for the law to be thrown out by the Constitutional Court.

The KPK is still a powerful body and is badly needed in the fight against corruption. It still has the authority to investigate and prosecute corruption cases. Nor did the Constitutional Court strip it of its power to conduct wiretapping, as requested by Mulyana.

For that reason, the government should set in place clear and strict regulations to prevent the corrupt from controlling such a powerful body.