This was really an anti-climax that will put off investors and disillusion most of the voters who re-elected President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono last July.
Under public-opinion pressures to meet the deadline, the House of Representatives rushed to approve the Corruption Court bill one day before the end of its five-year tenure Wednesday.
But the new law, instead of strengthening, will weaken the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and its Corruption Court because the legislation will abolish most of its hard-hitting intervention powers, which have so far been the key to the KPK’s great achievements in investigating and prosecuting corruptors.
Most damaging is the ambiguous article in the new law regarding the deployment of bugging devices which was explicitly stipulated in the 2002 Law on the KPK. Consequently, the KPK will no longer be able to use wiretaps without a warrant, a legal procedure which will virtually render such a method useless and ineffective.
The abolition of this extraordinary power will adversely affect KPK performance because mobile phone telecommunications wiretaps, intercepts and close-circuit camera surveillance have been crucial to its success in busting corruptors, catching them red-handed with huge sums of money for bribes.
Likewise, the requirement of the new law to immediately set up Corruption Courts in all (33) provinces and in 490 regencies and cities within two years will ruin the reputation of the KPK.
Because it will be impossible for the Supreme Court to train and prepare, within such a short time, so many career and ad hoc judges with the required high standards of competence and integrity.
It is because of the acute lack of competent and clean judges - in view of the corruption-tainted regular court system - that the Corruption Court was initially set up only in Jakarta to focus its powers effectively.
We are greatly concerned that the performance of this network of hastily-established Corruption Courts outside Jakarta will be so notoriously bad that it will damage the public’s previous high level of trust in the KPK and devalue the reputation of the Corruption Court to the low standing of the regular courts.
The KPK and the Corruption Court were set up in the first place primarily because of deeply entrenched corruption in public administration and political culture. Corruption has long been perceived as endemic, systemic and deeply-institutionalized, involving almost the whole system of the government, notably including the judiciary and the police, so presenting the government administration overall as one of the most corrupt in the world.
The new law’s stipulation that authorizes the district court chief or the Supreme Court to determine the number and composition of judges of the decentralized Corruption Courts would allow the corrupt mentality within the regular court system to creep into the KPK framework.
The 100 percent success rate (in terms of convictions) at the Corruption Court in Jakarta has been attributed in part to there being a majority of ad hoc judges in the five-member panel of judges.
Anyway, the new law has only capped the series of attacks from law makers, the police and the Attorney’s General Office, on the much-feared KPK. Two weeks ago, the police, notoriously perceived as one of the most-corrupt public institutions in the country, named two KPK senior officials as suspects in a bribery case under a highly-questionable legal procedure which they adopted due to what the public perceived as an utter lack of evidence.
But it is mind-boggling to try to understand why President Yudhoyono has not thrown all his weight behind the non-governmental anti-corruption watchdogs which have fought all-out to prevent the House from debilitating the KPK and the Corruption Court.
After all, fighting corruption was a key point in his political platform during the 2004 presidential election and his achievement in this area over the past five years was one of the main factors contributing to his reelection for the second term.
On the contrary, Yudhoyono, intentionally or unintentionally, joined the ranks of those weakening the KPK by issuing recently a government regulation in-lieu-of-law to appoint three acting members to the KPK governing board, thereby arguably undermining the political independence of the anti-graft body.
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