Law enforcers blamed for failing to stop environmental damage
Law enforcers blamed for failing to stop environmental damage
By Budisantoso Budiman
BANDAR LAMPUNG, Lampung (Antara): Environmental destruction is
continuing unabated, while legal redress goes nowhere as hardly
any cases have been satisfactorily resolved.
Koesnadi Hardjasoemantri, an expert on environmental law from
Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, said Indonesian law
enforcers did not have the same interpretation about the laws.
Addressing a recent seminar on the environment sponsored by
the Indonesian Police in Bandar Lampung, Koesnadi urged law
enforcers to learn about environment laws to remedy the
situation.
One of the laws -- Law No. 23/1997 on Environmental Management
explicitly prescribes punishments against perpetrators. However,
law enforcers still maintain different interpretations of the
law.
Watoni Noerdin, chief of the Indonesian Legal Institute
division in charge of land disputes in Lampung, said that the
authorities failed to take the initiative in solving
environmental disputes. Watoni said they would act only after
somebody reported an incident.
"The authorities should act with or without reports from the
public," Watoni said.
Like major cases of violence sparked by racial, religious,
political or social conflicts, environmental cases in Lampung and
elsewhere have not been redressed by legal actions.
Lampung chief detective Lt. Col. Heru Winarno flatly rejected
the allegation. "Many ecological cases have been brought to trial
despite our limited resources," he said.
But Muhammad Akib, an expert on the environment, supported the
idea that law enforcers lacked the initiative to handle
environmental cases, despite the fact that laws, including the
Criminal Code, are in place.
"The laws authorize the police to act without waiting for a
complaint if they believe the environmental destruction affects
the public interest," Akib said.
Akib said it was currently unrealistic to hope for a quick
solution to ecological cases in Lampung because it was not even
clear which agencies were supposed to handle such cases. Related
law enforcers should make a breakthrough in this area, he said.
Akib pointed out that the 1997 environment laws had many
loopholes that perpetrators could easily exploit.
"There are a lot of articles in the law that need clarifying.
Consequently, many law enforcers aren't sure what to do when they
are handling cases," he said.
Chairman of the Lampung provincial Development Planning Board
Rachmat Abdullah acknowledged that the laws did not specify his
office's authority in dealing with environmental issues.
"We want to see the perpetrator, be it a company or
individual, be arraigned. But the problem is whether the police
and prosecutors support this idea," he said.
An expert in the field of conservation, Ali Kabul Mahi, said
that all preserved forests across Lampung were under serious
threat mainly due to unchecked illegal logging.
According to the official statistics, Lampung boasts 1.23
million hectares of forests. Environmental activists say that the
forests are quickly dwindling because of logging.
"It is not only forests which are being destroyed. Coral reefs
have the same fate and so do mangroves," Ali said.
He said the catastrophe would continue unless the provincial
government took prompt actions to halt the environmental
destruction.