T

he Constitutional Court ruled on Thursday to limit the budgeting role of the House of Representatives amid concerns that the House'€™s budget committee was too powerful and prone to corruption.

The ruling was made in favor of plaintiffs consisting of a number of anticorruption groups, including the Foundation of the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute (YLBHI), the Indonesian Legal Roundtable (ILR), Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) and several others, which filed the case in early 2013 when several members of the budget committee were facing graft charges.

With the ruling, the House no longer has the authority to specifically allocate any of the state budget for '€œactivities and types of spending'€. The House only has the authority to now allocate funds for '€œorganizational units, functions and programs'€.

The court also ruled that the House could no longer postpone the disbursement of funds if the allocation had been approved. '€œWhen the House, through the budget committee, has the authority to discuss in detail the draft budget to the level of '€˜activities and the types of expenditure'€™, it exceeds its budgetary authority and has entered the role of executive power to implement budget planning,'€ Justice Ahmad Fadlil Sumadi said. '€œTherefore, we concluded that there should be a limit to the budget details that can be discussed or changed by the House.'€

Fadlil added that the House '€œshould now firmly approve or disapprove certain budgets without giving any requirements or delaying the disbursement and giving it a grade'€ as the court found that such requirements were prone to abuse of power.

During a hearing in August last year, Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) deputy chairman Bambang Widjojanto told the bench that the authority of the budget committee '€œwas too vast, lacked monitoring and had no parameters to evaluate budgeting performance, presenting a gray area for lobbying'€.

Representing the antigraft body, which was asked to give input on the judicial review, Bambang also said House members used the '€œinformal approach'€ of backroom deals that was even harder to monitor.

The KPK came to the conclusion after finding indications of such dealings in previous cases.

According to Bambang, his office handled a number of cases involving 65 lawmakers and councilors between 2004 and 2012. This group was the third-largest after public officials (97) and private sector employees (83). Meanwhile, budget misappropriation involving legislators was the third most prevalent of the cases handled by the KPK, with 38 cases between 2004 and 2013, after bribery with 144 cases and procurement mismanagement with 107 cases out of 321 cases.

He later mentioned four examples of cases involving former budget committee members, namely Muhammad Nazaruddin and Angelina Sondakh of the ruling Democratic Party, Wa Ode Nurhayati of the National Mandate Party (PAN) and Zulkarnaen Djabar of the Golkar Party.

The activists filed for a review to challenge several articles in the 2009 law on the People'€™s Consultative Assembly (MPR), the House of Representatives (DPR), the Regional Representatives Council (DPD) and Regional Legislative Councils (DPRDs) and the 2003 State Finance Law. The articles required a permanent budget committee with a five-year term, the House'€™s mechanism of budget allocation approval, which the plaintiffs deemed as too detailed and prone to corruption, the House'€™s authority to delay budget disbursement and the mechanism of deliberating state budget revisions.

Expert witness Iwan Gardono Sujatmiko also argued that the prevailing mechanism for budget deliberations violated the Constitution as they were often not transparent.

However on Thursday, the court did not grant the petition to make the budget committee a non-
permanent body, saying that it was '€œan open policy under the House'€ to determine the nature of the body.

The plaintiffs'€™ lawyer, Erwin Natosmal, said after the hearing that he appreciated the ruling despite the court not granting all of the petitions.

'€œThe root of the problem has been scrapped by the court even though the budget committee still exists. It can no longer block budget allocations in exchange for bribes.'€