THE government has been accused of being soft on corruption after the Law and Human Rights Ministry granted parole to nearly two dozen graft convicts this week, including a former public prosecutor who will walk free after just a year in prison despite an initial 10-year sentence.
On Tuesday, the ministry granted parole to 23 graft convicts, sparking outrage from anti-corruption activists and even the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) itself, which had conducted many of the probes that led to the convictions.
A spokesperson for the ministry’s directorate general for corrections facilities, Rika Apriyanti, justified the early release by saying that the 23 criminals made up just a fraction of the 1,368 convicts who were granted privileges, including parole, conditional leave and leave before release, this month.
The 23 graft convicts were released from two correctional facilities – Sukamiskin Penitentiary in Bandung, West Java, and Tangerang Penitentiary in Banten, Rika said as quoted by Kompas.
She suggested that any convict who had fulfilled certain requirements, including exhibiting good behaviour and participating actively in rehabilitation programmes, was eligible for extra privileges.
The official said the privileges were non-discriminatory and that the crime committed had no bearing on the decision to grant them.
For convicts to be considered for parole, they must have served at least two thirds of their sentence, in addition to the requirements listed above. But, some convicts have managed to trim off much larger portions off their prison terms.
The parolees include former Banten governor Ratu Atut Chosiyah and her brother Tubagus “Wawan” Chaeri Wardana, former Constitutional Court justice Patrialis Akbar, former religious affairs minister Suryadharma Ali and former Attorney General’s Office prosecutor Pinangki Sirna Malasari.
Notably, Pinangki had only served a year of her sentence before being granted parole on Tuesday.
After being detained as a suspect in August 2020, she was found guilty of accepting a US$500,000 bribe from then-fugitive business tycoon Djoko Tjandra in February 2021.
While she was initially handed a 10-year sentence, Pinangki appealed to the Supreme Court in 2015 and had her prison time reduced to four years on the grounds that she was a mother of a four-year-old child.
The court’s decision was widely criticised for being too lenient, a complaint that is now reemerging.
In a written statement, KPK spokesperson Ali Fikri contended that since corruption was categorised as an extraordinary crime in Indonesia, it should be handled in an equally extraordinary manner.
“This includes the rehabilitation procedure in correctional facilities, as it makes up an integral part of the law enforcement process,” he said.
He claimed that as prison sentences and other forms of punishment were supposed to serve as deterrents for would-be perpetrators, privileges granted to graft convicts would hurt anti-corruption efforts in the long run.
He cited the removal of graft convicts’ political rights and the KPK’s asset recovery efforts as examples of such deterrents.
Ratu Atut and former Jambi governor Zumi Zola – other graft convicts being released on parole – both had some of their political rights temporarily stripped as part of their punishment.
Echoing Ali’s statement, Kurnia Ramadhana of Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) took aim at Law No.22/2022, also known as the Corrections Law.
“Under the new Corrections Law, graft convicts are given the same treatment as other criminal convicts ... If corruption is categorised as an extraordinary crime, their punishments have to be more severe and conditions for parole and remissions have to be stricter,” Kurnia said on Wednesday.
In recent years, the nation’s anti-graft movement has been dealt blow after blow after high-level politicians moved to put an end to the freewheeling style of high-profile graft busting.
Transparency International Indonesia, whose global office publishes its Corruption Perception Index (CPI) annually, has noted that President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s recent State of the Nation address was “atypical” because many were convinced that Indonesia was in the midst of an episode of democratic backsliding that had affected its anti-corruption scores.
Jokowi mentioned the term “corruption” five times in his speech but failed to disclose that much of the progress in the year had stemmed from global economic indicators.
In 2021, Indonesia scored 38 points in the CPI on a scale of 0-100. Countries with higher scores are considered less corrupt. — The Jakarta Post/ANN
