Tag Archives: KPK

Guest Post: A Bleak Future for Indonesia’s Anticorruption Commission?

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GAB is pleased to welcome back Sofie Arjon Schütte, Senior Advisor at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, to contribute today’s guest post:

Indonesia’s Corruption Eradication Commission, known by its acronym KPK, was established during Indonesia’s reformation period in the early 2000s, and quickly became one of the world’s most powerful and independent anticorruption commissions. When the KPK began operations in 2004, a government regulation granted the agency substantial autonomy in its human resources management system, which the KPK used to ensure the integrity and competence of its staff. This control over personnel is considered good practice by international standards for anticorruption agencies, especially in environments where the existing state apparatus, and in particular law enforcement, is part of the corruption problem. And in Indonesia’s case, the KPK’s success in ensuring a competent and honest staff has been crucial to the agency’s track record of success—a track record that includes bringing more than 700 cases, the large majority of which resulted in guilty verdicts against members of Indonesia’s national and regional political elite.

But the KPK’s threat to vested interests has provoked strong resistance. This resistance has taken many forms, from judicial hostility, orchestrated demonstrations and threats, personal attacks on members of the organization, stalling the agency’s budget, and attempts to curtail its authority and autonomy through other legislative changes. The most devastating development was a new KPK Law, adopted in 2019, that was pushed through the legislature in rapid time without public input. This law effectively stripped the KPK of autonomy in important investigative functions and in its human resources management (here and here). Under the law, by September 2021 the KPK is to be integrated into the state apparatus, and its employees must become regular civil servants.

Allegedly as part of this process of integrating KPK employees into the regular civil service, the government recently required all KPK officials to take a specially concocted “national vision exam.” To be clear, neither the 2019 KPK Law nor its implementing regulations explicitly require such a test, which differs from the standard civil service entrance exam that all civil servants must take. Rather, this special test was developed by the National Civil Service Agency in collaboration with the Indonesian Armed Forces and Intelligence Service specifically to determine which KPK officers were radical and lacked neutrality and integrity and therefore presumably unfit for future civil service.

Seventy-five KPK employees failed this special exam. That may not seem like a big deal, both because 75 people amounts to less than 6% of the KPK’s current staff of over 1,300 employees, and because it might seem that failing a civil service exam is a reasonable ground for dismissal. But as the names of those who failed the test, and more details about the questions and the process, were made public, many critics have raised legitimate concerns. Indeed, even before the test was administered, the KPK employees’ union (which, by the way, will cease to exist after the conversion of the KPK into a regular civil service agency) warned that such a test could be misused to legitimize the marginalization or dismissal of KPK officers that handle strategic cases or hold strategic positions in the agency. And now that the results have come out, there are reasons to believe these fears were well-founded.

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Guest Post: Indonesian Anticorruption Institutions at Risk, Part 2: Legislative Amendments Spell Disaster for the KPK

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GAB is pleased to welcome Simon Butt, Professor of Indonesian Law and Director of the Centre for Asian and Pacific Law, the University of Sydney, to contribute a two-part series on recent developments in Indonesia. Today’s post, the second of the two, is a revised and expanded version of an article that Professor Butt originally published on Indonesia at Melbourne.

As I discussed in yesterday’s post, Indonesia’s anticorruption commission (the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, or KPK) has found itself under serious attack since it began to pursue powerful political figures. Members of the national parliament, many of whom have found themselves in the KPK’s sights, have long threatened to use their legislative power to weaken the KPK and undermine its independence. For many years the KPK has managed to stave off such threats, thanks mainly to strong leadership and public support. But the KPK has found itself in a weakened state in recent months. It lost its first case in its 17-year history, and more significantly, the KPK’s leadership team has been replaced with a new group of problematic commissioners, whose terms commence next year. And last month, on September 17th, the parliament took advantage of this vulnerability and finally made good on its threat to amend the 2002 statute that established the KPK. These amendments, which attack the very institutional features and powers the KPK has used to build its impressive track record, are disastrous for the KPK and Indonesia’s fight against corruption. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Indonesian Anticorruption Institutions at Risk, Part 1: The Significance of the KPK’s First Acquittal

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GAB is pleased to welcome Simon Butt, Professor of Indonesian Law and Director of the Centre for Asian and Pacific Law, the University of Sydney, to contribute a two-part series on recent developments in Indonesia. Today’s post, the first of the two, is a revised and expanded version of an article that Professor Butt originally published on the East Asia Forum.)

Over the past decade or so, Indonesia’s anticorruption commission (the Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi, or KPK) had managed to deflect numerous efforts of powerful politicians and senior law enforcement figures to reduce its independence and effectiveness. However, last month Indonesia’s national parliament appears to have successfully hobbled the Commission, with the support of President Joko Widodo. The effort to weaken the Commission began with the appointment of a new batch of commissioners, widely condemned as being sympathetic to the regime or likely to be ineffective. This was followed by amendments to the Commission’s founding statute that are clearly designed to render the Commission ineffective in investigating and prosecuting corruption.

An important precursor to these events was the KPK’s first loss in court. Until this past July, the KPK had not, since its establishment in 2003, lost any of the hundreds of cases it had brought to full trial. This was a remarkable achievement in a country renowned for deeply entrenched and widespread corruption at the highest levels, particularly in government institutions and the courts.

But on July 11, 2019, the KPK’s perfect record was broken when a divided three-judge Supreme Court panel voted to acquit Syafruddin Arsyad Temenggung, the former chair of the Indonesian Bank Restructuring Agency. Temenggung had been convicted at trial (in one of Indonesia’s specialized anticorruption courts) for a scheme in which a businessman, Sjamsul Nursalim, overstated the value of assets used to repay government assistance funds he had received after the 1997 Asian Economic Crisis. According to the prosecution, by improperly approving the discharge of Nursalim’s debt, Temenggung caused the Indonesian state to lose 4.5 trillion rupiah (well over USD 300 million). Temenggung’s lawyers argued, among other things, that there was no proof that their client had obtained any benefit from Nursalim in exchange for discharging the debt, and that their client was simply doing his job and had not committed any crime. The trial court rejected these defences, convicted Temenggung, and sentenced him to 12 years’ imprisonment. On the first appeal, the Jakarta High Provincial Court affirmed the conviction and increased the prison sentence to 15 years. But Temenggung then appealed to the Supreme Court, and there he prevailed. At time of writing, the Supreme Court judgment acquitting Temenggung has not yet been made publicly available. Nevertheless, according to media reports, two of the three judges on the panel voted to acquit Temenggung, though for somewhat different reasons, while the third judge would have affirmed the conviction.

Given that the KPK probably lacks a legal basis for asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision, the KPK appears to have now suffered its first defeat in its 15-year history. The loss of this case is a major blow on its own terms, because it was the KPK’s largest-ever case in monetary terms, involving over twice the alleged state loss than its previous largest case. But the significance of this acquittal may be much broader, and raises a number of questions about the future of corruption eradication efforts in Indonesia. Continue reading →