http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/lawandorder/watchdog-receives-more-than-1000-reports-against-prosecutors-in-2012/562279
Watchdog Receives More Than 1,000 Reports Against Prosecutors in 2012 Rangga Prakoso | December 18, 2012 A government watchdog monitoring the performance of prosecutors says it has received about 1,107 complaints from the public in 2012, ranging from allegations of extortion to collusion with other law enforcement officials. Halius Hosen, head of the Prosecutors Commission, said on Monday that his office received the complaints via letters, phone calls, text messages and directly from the people complaining. “Out of the 1,107 reports, 568 have been forwarded to the attorney general and assistant attorney general for supervision,” he said. Some complaints were lodged against prosecutors who allegedly failed to enforce court verdicts, while others chided prosecutors who were deemed unprofessional because they sided with or defendants. Others were accused of not following proper procedures or for weakening their cases against defendants. Some were cited for dragging their feet in prosecuting cases, while others were called out for not returning seized evidence. Some prosecutors were accused of extorting defendants, while others allegedly colluded with police officers, judges or lawyers who turned civil cases into criminal ones. Halius said that 207 reports had not been followed up on by his commission because the people who reported the cases gave false addresses. In October, the Attorney General’s Office began investigating three of its officials for allegedly attempting to extort a Rp 2.5 billion ($260,000) payment from a company by claiming that it was the subject of a criminal investigation. S.T. Burhanuddin, the assistant attorney general for civil and state administrative affairs, confirmed at the time that all three suspects were from his department but denied that they had been acting on department orders. “It has nothing whatsoever to do with my department. What they did was purely on their own,” he said. “Their superiors also don’t know anything about it. If they did, we would have arrested them too.” He added that investigators had not yet questioned the suspects’ superiors. The case stems from the arrest on Oct. 8 of Dedi Prihartono, a former prosecutor, during a sting at a mall in South Jakarta. He was arrested while allegedly taking a Rp 50 million bribe from a representative of a company identified only as BIM. BIM had earlier reported Dedi to the AGO for allegedly claiming that the company was the subject of a criminal investigation, but that the company could get the case dropped in exchange for a Rp 2.5 billion payoff. Dedi’s bust led to the arrest of three novice officials at the AG [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
