This year has not been a good year for the Attorney General’s Office (AGO). The AGO has had to grapple with a lot of politics in running its function, and the AGO has also been said to have failed to prosecute major cases. Let’s take a look at their track record.
The Indonesia Corrruption Watch (ICW) reported that there were 1,775 cases of corruption in the AGO that stopped at the level of inquisition up until the period of 2014. The poor performance on the handling of cases may be due to the lack of human resources. But that’s positive thinking. There are those who are more inclined to believe that the AGO is not committed to resolving cases involving major actors.
There are also those who believe that the AGO has performed poorly in 2015 because the Attorney General is a politician of Nasdem. Those believe this to be true have been vindicated with the scandal involving Patrice Rio Capella, a Nasdem party politician, who’s been accused of acting as a case broker, using his Nasdem network to influence prosecution in the AGO.
The Attorney General has dismissed the accusation that he’s politicized the AGO. To demonstrate his commitment to expedite prosecution, Attorney General HM Prasetyo formed the Special Task Force on the Management and Settlement of Corruption Case (Satgassus P3TPK) at the beginning of the year. But instead of handling major cases, the Task Force ended up taking on board small cases of violations in the regions. And even then, the Satgassus P3TPK has not shown any meaningful success.
The following is the list of cases the AGO has to prosecute and the various stages they’re in:
List of Cases Undertaken before 2015
List of Cases Undertaken in 2015
How will the year 2016 look for the AGO? The answer to that question will depend on the Attorney General’s ability to expedite prosecution. And beyond that it’s important for the AG to make sure that his prosecutors are able to secure a respectable winning track record in court. For now, we can’t say that the AGO has done a good job at that.
What is likely to happen in the near future is the Attorney General attempting to score kudos by going after the former Speaker of the House Setya Novanto and oil magnate Mohammad Reza Chalid for allegedly offering PT Freeport Indonesia a contract extension in exchange for shares and other things. The question is, will the AGO bring Novanto’s scandal to the prosecutorial stage? At which point the question becomes, will the AGO succeed in prosecuting Novanto and Reza? What do you think?
By Pradnya Paramitha
Copying, redistributing, and retransmitting this article is a violation of copyright law.
