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View all search results‘Light’ sentencing stunts Indonesia’s corruption fight
Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW) recently found that graft convicts only get a prison sentence of three years and three months on average and only 4 percent of total estimated state loss incurred from corruption cases can be recovered throughout 2024.
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Former Central Jakarta District Court deputy head and graft defendant Muhammad Arif Nuryanta attends the verdict hearing against him on Dec. 3 at the Jakarta Corruption Court in Jakarta. The judges sentenced Arif to a 12.5-year imprisonment and a Rp 500 million fine for accepting bribes to influence the verdict against three companies in a corruption case pertaining to crude palm oil exports. (Antara/Indrianto Eko Suwarso)
I
ndonesia's struggle to deter corruption persists as graft convicts tend to get light punishment from the court and potentially receive pardons from the government, while law enforcement institutions are still grappling to recover state losses from extraordinary crime amid weak legal frameworks.
The world observed on Tuesday International Anticorruption Day, a global annual campaign commemorating the passage of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) in 2003, which Indonesia ratified in 2006.
But two decades later, observers slam Indonesia’s fight against corruption for not being able to root out the pervasive extraordinary crime in the world’s third-largest democracy.
The grim progress of anticorruption efforts was depicted in a recent report from Indonesia Corruption Watch (ICW), which recorded a downward trend in prison terms slapped against 1,871 corruption defendants throughout 2024. They were prosecuted in 1,768 cases handled by the Attorney General’s Office (AGO) and Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK).
The average prison sentence handed to all convicts, according to ICW, was three years and three months, which falls into the “light” sentence category based on a 2020 Supreme Court regulation. The figure was also one month fewer than those recorded between 2021 and 2023.
Read also: Concern grows over impact of budget cuts on corruption investigations
In terms of state loss recovery, Indonesia saw a record high of Rp 330.9 trillion (US$19.8 billion) to be potentially recovered, most of which came from the case pertaining state-owned tin mining giant PT Timah that was investigated by AGO last year that incurred a Rp 300 trillion state loss.
