Camelia Pasandaran – Human rights activists have called on legislators to ensure that a bill on intelligence includes adequate provisions holding the State Intelligence Agency to account for its actions.

Hendardi, chairman of the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace, said on Tuesday that in its current form, the bill lacked such provisions to rein in the agency, also known as BIN.

"The new bill fails to provide an adequate mechanism for accountability," he said. "If there is abuse, can we demand that intelligence agents be held legally responsible? The bill should clearly address the possibility of human rights abuses."

He also proposed the establishment of an external body empowered with full authority to supervise the agency. "The body should have the ability to investigate BIN's activities and report its results to the House of Representatives and the public," he said. "It should even have access to classified information."

He said the country's intelligence activities had never been made transparent or accountable. He cited the example of the National Police's counterterrorism unit, Densus 88, which has been accused of the extrajudicial killings of suspects and civilians.

Hendardi said internal codes of conduct at agencies such as BIN were insufficient to prevent its members from violating human rights. Such codes, he said, are geared toward protecting their own and therefore foster a culture of impunity.

The intelligence bill, which is being deliberated by House Commission I, which oversees defense, foreign and political affairs, lists three possible methods for ensuring accountability.

The first is for BIN to report its activities to the president through a proposed coordinating body on state intelligence. The second is for the establishment of an ethics council to hear allegations of violations. The third method, meanwhile, is for the House to play a supervisory role.

However, Mulyana Kusuma, director of Seven Strategic Studies, a social research group, said only the third method would provide any real semblance of supervision for BIN. "There are no specific provisions on internal supervision, executive supervision or legal supervision," he said.

Abdul Malik Haramain, a member of House Commission II overseeing state apparatus, said that given the greater powers to be vested in BIN through the passage of the bill, it was also necessary to strengthen the supervision of the agency.

"A special team should be set up in the House that would have the right to retain expert advisers to help supervise the agency closely," the National Awakening Party (PKB) lawmaker said. "That way, we'll know who's doing the monitoring."