Heru Andriyanto – The South Jakarta District Court on Monday threw out a pretrial motion filed by a group of lawyers who challenged the decision to drop criminal charges against two antigraft officials.
"According to the Criminal Procedures Code, those who can file a pretrial motion are the police, prosecutors or the third party directly affected [by the decision]," Judge Kusno argued on Monday.
The lawyers said they had filed the motion because they believed prosecutors broke the law when they dropped the charges against Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) deputy chairmen Chandra M Hamzah and Bibit Samad Rianto because President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono suggested that they should.
The disappointed petitioners rushed toward Kusno's seat as soon as he issued the ruling, prompting Kusno to flee the courtroom.
The court's security officials immediately took control of the situation but the lawyers continued to demand a meeting with Kusno in his office. "He is ignoring the supremacy of the law," one of the protesters shouted at the judge as he fled.
Lawyer Eggi Sudjana, who led the group, said he would consider appealing the court's ruling.
In a separate hearing, a similar demand filed by a different group of lawyers, led by the Otto Cornelius Kaligis law firm, was also rejected by the same court.
In that case, Judge Tahsin repeated Kusno's statement that the only parties who could lodge a pretrial motion, other than the police or prosecutors, were those directly affected by the decision. He said fugitive graft suspects Djoko Tjandra and Anggoro Widjojo would be eligible to do so, but not the group of lawyers led by Kaligis.
Bibit and Chandra were initially accused of abusing their power at the antigraft agency by lifting a travel ban against Djoko, who was a suspect in a KPK graft case, while imposing a travel ban on another suspect, Anggoro. Both are still on the run.
The petitioners have argued that the decision to drop the case against Chandra and Bibit could further damage the country's already unpredictable justice system and the principle of equality before the law, noting that many other suspects had been tried and convicted for minor cases such as "stealing watermelons."
The lawyers also alleged that Yudhoyono's intervention had unfairly influenced the case. Yudhoyono formed a fact-finding team to investigate the case and later advised prosecutors not to proceed to trial after the team's report concluded that the charges were baseless.
The Attorney General's Office dropped the case against Bibit and Chandra after being subjected to intense public scrutiny and fierce criticism.
After the KPK launched investigations into Anggoro, the extortion scandal took on a life of its own when telephone conversations, secretly recorded by the KPK, indicated that the charges against Chandra and Bibit had been fabricated by law enforcement agencies to weaken the commission and to frame the two deputies.
Shortly after the Constitutional Court played the recorded conversations at a public hearing last month, Yudhoyono suggested that prosecutors and police not take the case to court, but stopped short of ordering its dismissal as recommended by the fact-finding team.