Why fix KPK when it is not broken?

Sofie A. Schütte
-

PREMIUM

Bergen, Norway / Fri, September 27, 2019 / 09:03 am

At least 1,500 students from 25 universities in the Greater Bandung region took to the streets to express their rejection of the discussion of the Draft Law on the Criminal Law, the Land Bill, and the Penitentiary Bill on Jalan Diponegoro, Bandung, Monday (9/23). These students also memento the government and the Parliament to cancel the Corruption Eradication Commission Act recently passed by the government. (JP/Arya Dipa)

Indonesia’s most promising attempt at controlling corruption and an inspiration for its peers internationally is about to lose a lot of what enabled it to be so effective and trusted because of changes in law that the House of Representatives just pushed through. In my native German, verschlimmbessern is a colloquial term for improving something for the worse. The new KPK Law does just that. “Anticorruption commission needs support of public”, the title of an article I wrote in this newspaper in 2004, was published just three months after the first generation of commissioners of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) was appointed and had taken up the challenge of building a new organization from scratch. Then executive director of the Partnership for Governance Reform in Indonesia, HS Dillon, who passed away on Sept. 16, had entrusted me with the t...