R

ights activists proposed Thursday that the intelligence bill should accommodate a monitoring mechanism and rehabilitate people who become the wrong target of intelligence operations.

“The bill accommodates a wide range of issues but corrective measures in case someone becomes a victim of an operation,” Puri Kencana Putri of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence told a discussion Thursday.

The bill, which is being finalized by the government before it is submitted to the House of Representatives for deliberation, shows the government’s lack of concern about the psychological impact on victim’s and their relatives.

It should have provisions about how the state will rehabilitate victims of wrong arrests, she added.

Supporting Puri’s idea was Ilham Yulhamzah Arif of the ProPatria Institute, an NGO promoting democracy in Indonesia. He said the future law should detail corrective measures the state should take to rehabilitate victims’ and untarnish their reputation.

“The future law should be able to stipulate specifically what rehabilitation and compensation victims are entitled to as token of the state’s respect for human rights,” he said.

He also urged the government to form an independent monitoring commission on intelligence affairs that comprised human rights watchdogs, the National Ombudsman Commission and the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK). Its main function would be to scrutinize the intelligence’s budget priorities. Muhammad AS Hikam, head of working committee on the intelligence bill from the National Intelligence Agency, said the bill had been designed to be enforced with strict monitoring from various agencies. He said President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono as the end user of intelligence products would be authorized to monitor the intelligence agency. Beside the President, the House commission I overseeing defense, foreign affairs and intelligence would also be authorized to monitor it.

Lawmaker Muhammad Najib of Commission I said that a big flaw in the current system was that the various intelligence agencies did not comprehensively monitor it. “We need to gain the public’s trust that we will have a different kind of intelligence agency, one with better accountability and transparency,” he said.

At present there are several intelligence bill drafts circulating in the public and the National Intelligence Agency has not made it clear which one is official. In addition to the absence of rehabilitation measures, the objections to the bill revolve around the enormous authority that intelligence institutions would wield. It, for example, allows intelligence agents to detain suspected people for up to a week before they can determine their status.