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n investigation carried out by a watchdog has confirmed that budget inflexibility has caused low prosecution rates in prosecutors'€™ offices.

The University of Indonesia'€™s Indonesian Judicial Watch Society (MAPPI) has found that severe budget cuts in 2016 made prosecutors'€™ offices suffer from low conviction rates, citing that prosecutors, on several occasions, failed to build strong cases because they could not get access to additional funds that hadn'€™t been planned for the ongoing fiscal year.

For example, leftover funds intended for interrogations cannot be used to fund the sudden need to summon expert witnesses in another case. Also, any leftover budget at a particular post will cut in the following year.

MAPPI recorded that in 2016 the government only gave enough funds to prosecutors to finance 39,514 cases, despite the fact that in 2015 the former disbursed a huge budget to prosecutors'€™ offices across the country, which are being supervised by the Attorney General'€™s Office, to cover 120,019 cases.

'€œThere is also a misperception on the part the government that it only disburses a particular amount of funds to solve a certain number of cases. You are given a budget for 10 cases and so you should find 10 crimes to satisfy the target. Law enforcement should not work that way. Such a system opens the way for prosecutors to invent cases to satisfy the target,'€ Julius Ibrani of MAPPI said on Sunday.

In 2012, prosecutors'€™ offices finished 104,539 cases, while in 2013 they closed 148,689 cases and in 2014 they handled 141,962 cases. In addition, between 2016 and 2019, the government gave prosecutors a target to finish about 131,000 cases per year.

Another MAPPI researcher, Dio Ashar Wicaksana, said that this year'€™s budget cut had severely affected the prosecution of cases in the Maluku prosecutors'€™ office because it only received enough funds to solve 15 cases, despite in the previous year having been given a budget sufficient for 60 to 70 cases.

'€œThe question remains about how the budget has all been spent in the early months of the year. How could prosecutors solve other cases without a budget during the remaining months? This will open doors for corruption, collusion and nepotism at prosecutors'€™ offices,'€ Dio added.

The chairman of the illegal fishing taskforce at the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry, Yunus Hussein, said that when was the chairman of the Financial Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (PPATK) his subordinates found that case exposés conducted by law enforcement institutions were financed by the suspects in the criminal cases.

Yunus also confirmed that the budget inflexibility did not only occur at prosecutors'€™ offices, but also at the taskforce he currently led.

He explained how difficult it was when his taskforce suddenly needed funds to finance a DNA test on fish to confirm that an arrested fishing vessel had encroached on Indonesian waters to steal fish.

'€œWe need to collect scientific evidence to support our claim. It is not cheap if we are really serious about upholding the law. To get the DNA evidence we should go to Singapore for a laboratory confirmation and it is very expensive,'€ Yunus said.

Also if this year the taskforce gets budgets to both maintain arrested fishing vessels and to destroy the vessels after their crews are found guilty of illegal fishing and the destruction was conducted in the early months of the year, then the maintenance budget will be left unused. In that case, in the following year the taskforce will receive a smaller budget for maintenance.

'€œIf you give a peanut you only get a monkey, but if you want to get more than a monkey then you should give more than a peanut,'€ Yunus said when illustrating how huge a budget law enforcement needs to enforce the law.

The chief of the East Jakarta Prosecutors'€™ Office, Narendra Jatna, who is also a legal expert from the University of Indonesia, said that the government should change its budgetary system for prosecutors'€™ offices to improve their performance in the future.

He said that prosecutors'€™ offices should use an actual-cost budgetary system like the one applied by the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) and the National Police.
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