The Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) says a number of state officials will get immunity from wiretapping if the government manages to endorse its regulation on the controversial law enforcement strategy correctly.
ICW deputy coordinator Emerson Yuntho said Wednesday there were at least seven groups of officials that might benefit from the regulation once it was endorsed.
“They are the communication and information minister, the Attorney General, the chief of the Jakarta district court, the President and his ministers, the members of the National Interception Central Board, the National Interception Supervisory Board, and the National Police chief,” he said.
“The list also extends to their families and colleagues,” he added.
Emerson said those officials had a dominant role stipulated in the proposed regulation.
“So, if the Corruption Eradication Commission [KPK] wants to wiretap one of them, it will be very difficult. The request for the wiretapping operation might be rejected or leaked,” he said.
A former prosecutor at the Attorney General’s Office investigation division, Chairul Imam, agreed with Emerson and said the planned regulation needed to be dropped.
“As long as the salaries for police officers and prosecutors remain low, then there is a great chance for
the wiretapping right to be misused,” he said.
Meanwhile, Asep Iwan Iriawan, who is a former judge at the Jakarta district court, said the government needed to have a much broader comprehension about the importance of wiretapping operations before proposing a plan to regulate it.
“Wiretapping operations are part of investigations that are based on solid legal grounds in the Constitution. The process of conducting wiretappings should be left to the respective law enforcement institutions,” he said.
“So, it is very important to maintain the secretive nature of wiretappings. How can we get a permission to wiretap a district court judge, if he is the subject of an investigation?” he added.
The proposed regulation on wiretapping has caused many controversies and debates, since it obligates all law enforcement institutions, including the KPK, to get permission from the Central Jakarta District Court before wiretapping public officials believed to be involved in corrupt practices.
Antigraft activists deemed the plan to be nothing but another effort to weaken the KPK after the Constitutional Court played on Nov. 3, wiretapped conversations, obtained by the KPK, between fugitive corruption suspect Anggoro Widjojo’s younger brother, Anggodo Widjojo and several high-ranking law enforcers from the National Police and the AGO.
The recordings revealed efforts to fabricate charges against KPK deputy chairmen Bibit Samad Rianto and Chandra M. Hamzah.
The controversy over the planned regulation has also ignited a fierce war of words between Information and Communications Minister Tifatul Sembiring and a member of the presidential advisory board, Adnan Buyung Nasution.
Adnan said Tifatul could have acted as the “spokesman for corruptors” because the minister was the one initiating the regulation draft in the first place.
Commenting on Adnan’s remarks, Tifatul said that he would “retire” Adnan as his senior.
Adnan then said Tifatul should have more respect to his seniors’ advices.
