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Sluggish police, judicial reforms hurt Indonesian forests
Jakarta Post - October 6, 2016
Following the termination of investigations (SP3) into 15 plantation companies for alleged land burning in Riau last year, the Riau Police have repeatedly refused to make the SP3 documents available to the public.
The Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras) and the Riau Forest Rescue Network (Jikalahari), both members of a coalition of NGOs formed to fight a perceived criminal conspiracy involving forest fires, have twice asked the Riau Police to give them the SP3 documents after the terminations triggered a public uproar.
The SP3 on the cases was issued in January, but they were only revealed in July when environmental activists visited the Riau Police headquarters seeking an update on the cases.
The coalition believed that the SP3 documents should be disclosed as there were lots of irregularities in the termination of the investigations, adding that there was no reason to keep the documents away from the public because the cases had been closed anyway.
"The documents are important because National Police chief Gen. Tito Karnavian himself has urged the public to file a pretrial motion, but without the documents the public won't be able to do so," the head of Kontras' economic rights advocate division, Ananto Setiawan, said.
He added that Kontras had even met with the Riau Police directly to ask for the documents after their requests, which were sent by letters, did not get any response.
"But once again they refused, explaining that they had an internal mechanism and so on. We see this as an attempt to block information and it only adds to the irregularities surrounding the termination of the investigations," Ananto said.
Among the irregularities cited was the credibility of the experts used to justify the termination of the investigations, according to the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL), which was a part of the same coalition with Kontras and Jikalahari.
ICEL forestry and land division researcher Isna Fatimah said that the witness was a staff member at the Riau Environmental Agency and thus his credibility and objectivity were questionable.
"Furthermore, the argument for the termination was that the fires were caused by local people, or that the areas were occupied by local people. Meanwhile, experts have said that this doesn't eliminate the responsibility of the concession holders," she said.
Isna also pointed out that of the seven companies for which investigations were terminated, two were involved in illegal logging cases in 2008, another two were involved in forest fire cases in 2014 and three had been slapped with administrative sanctions.
Therefore, the coalition has urged President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo to ask Tito to hold a special case hearing over the SP3s.
The coalition also plans to file a petition with the Central Information Commission (KIP) if the Riau Police fail to reply to their demand by Monday, Isna said.
Besides the police's commitment, concerns have also been raised over the quality of judges presiding over forest fire cases, in particular judge Parlas Nababan.
Earlier this year, Parlas created a controversy after declaring PT Bumi Mekar Hijau (BMH) not guilty for the burning of 20,000 hectares of its concession in Ogan Komering Ilir, South Sumatra, in 2014.
He reasoned that BMH was still able to plant acacia trees on the concession after it was burned, which according to him meant there must have been no environmental damage.
The Judicial Commission launched an investigation in early 2016 into Parlas following his controversial ruling. On July 26, the Commission finished its investigation, concluding that Parlas had breached the ethics code for his biased ruling and unprofessionalism.
The ministry's law enforcement director general, Rasio Ridho Sani, said that many judges had actually been environmentally certified, which had helped boost the conviction rate in forest fire cases.
"If we're talking about civil cases, we win about 80 percent of the cases," he told The Jakarta Post. "If we're talking about criminal cases, the conviction rate is quite high, but often the sentences are lower than our demands."
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