Integrated agency to deal with environmental crimes

Moch. N. Kurniawan, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The National Police, the Attorney General's Office and the Office of the State Minister for the Environment supported on Friday a call to establish an integrated agency to supervise, investigate, and prosecute cases of environment law violation.

Sudarsono of the Office of the State Ministry for the Environment, Yuzyar Yahya of the Attorney General's Office, and Brig. Jen. Edi Darnadi of the National Police, agreed that such an agency could help overhaul the current ineffective mechanism for dealing with environmental crimes.

"We are supporting an integrated system to handle environment cases... It's OK if our prosecutors are borrowed by the agency," said Yushar, pre-prosecution director in the Attorney General's Office, at a seminar held by the Indonesian Center for Environment Law (ICEL).

Edi, head of the National Police's special crimes division, said such an integrated agency could help unify perceptions and action among officials from the environment department, the police and prosecutors.

Mas Ahmad Santosa, an ICEL senior counsel, hoped that the support to establish an integrated agency would be enshrined in a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).

"The State Minister for the Environment, Nabiel Makarim, and National Police chief Da'i Bachtiar must sign an MoU on the integrated agency," he said.

It was the ICEL that first proposed the idea of establishing such an agency.

He said Canada had been successful in implementing such an approach to the handling of environmental crimes.

Without such an agency, environmental crimes would end up being treated differently by the environment department, police and Attorney General's Office, he said.

For example, state prosecutors have recently demanded that a number of dredgers allegedly involved in the smuggling of sand from Riau to Singapore pay fines of Rp 30 million for each vessel, although their operations caused billions of rupiah in damage to the environment.

Last month, the National Police also issued an order halting an investigation into PT Maspion in Sidoarjo, East Java, which was accused of polluting the environment with hazardous waste.

The police argued that they could not continue the pollution investigation as the case occurred before the issuance of Law No. 23/1997 on the environment.

State Minister Nabiel was reportedly disappointed with the police decision to stop the investigation into Maspion.

"These are only few examples that show how poorly environmental crimes are handled here," he said.

Ahmad also said ICEL had proposed five options to the Supreme Court for improving the prevailing mechanisms for the prosecution of environmental violations.

Among the options were that judges be trained in environment law, and environmental problems and solution, the establishment of an ad hoc court, the setting up of a special court chamber for environmental matters, and the setting up of a special court similar to the State Administrative Court.