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n a sign of animosity toward the nation’s antigraft body, lawmakers have refused to acknowledge a decision by the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) to clear two Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) leaders of bribery charges.

House lawmakers said the two KPK commissioners would continue to be regarded as graft suspects.

During a hearing with AGO officials on Monday, members of the House of Representatives’ Commission III overseeing law and human rights criticized Attorney General Basrief Arief’s decision to issue a deponeering, dropping charges against Bibit Samad Rianto and Chandra M. Hamzah.

A deponeering is a local legal principle used to halt prosecution for the sake of public interest.

“Despite [Basrief’s] explanation, I still believe that the deponeering did not clear Bibit and Chandra’s suspect status. Please, I hope an attorney general does not disrupt our legal system,” Ahmad Yani of the United Development Party (PPP) said at the hearing.

At the hearing Basrief discussed with the lawmakers the details of the deponeering principle as stipulated under the 2004 Law on the AGO. The concept was adopted from a Dutch legal principle.

“Any suspect to whose prosecution the Attorney General applies deponeering is no longer a suspect,” he said.

Commission III chair Benny Kabur Harman of the Democratic Party said Basrief had failed to provide a reasonable legal basis for the decision, which could be perceived as an abuse of power. “A deponeering is at my discretion. It’s my prerogative. If you say my decision was subjective, yes that is true. But I want to reiterate one more time, the decision did not involve any intervention from any party. We have a team specially tasked to study it before the decision was made,” Basrief said.

Yani said the deponeering was inappropriate because former National Police chief Bambang Hendarso Danuri had vowed to lawmakers that the investigation of Bibit and Chandra’s case had been done properly without any orchestration or intervention.

Commission III lawmakers rejected Bibit and Chandra’s attendance at a hearing with KPK officials last month, citing “ethical issues in meeting with graft suspects”.

The commission also voted to bar Bibit and Chandra from attending any of its hearings. Commission members from the Democratic Party, the People’s Awakening Party (PKB) and the National Mandate Party (PAN) rejected the motion to bar Bibit and Chandra from hearings, but lost out to those from the six other parties.

Activist Tama S. Langkun from Indonesia Corruption Watch said the lawmakers’ controversial move was likely a “counter-attack” against the KPK’s decision to detain 24 politicians in a high profile bribery case. Those detained were 13 politicians from the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P), nine from the Golkar Party and two from the PPP.

One of the suspects was Panda Nababan, a senior PDI-P politician who was also an active member of the House’s Commission III.

While still a suspect and until he was detained by the KPK in January, Panda attended numerous meetings with the commission’s counterparts without any lawmakers voicing their disagreement.

Forty current and former lawmakers have been named graft suspects by the KPK since the body was established in 2003.