As we commemorate today the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), the corruption eradication agenda in Indonesia is growing increasingly concerning. Indonesia scored a historic low in the 2022 Corruption Perception Index (CPI), the worst since 1997, almost two decades since the beginning of the UNCAC regime in Indonesia.

Indonesia’s slump in the CPI certainly cannot obliterate public tension, even though the country has just been welcomed as a full member of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF). Indonesia dropped four points from the previous year to 34, one of the sharpest declines among Asian countries, and its ranking fell 14 places from 96th previously.

Indonesia is now on the brink of joining the bottom third of the most corrupt countries in the world, far below its Southeast Asian neighbors such as Singapore, Malaysia, Timor-Leste, Vietnam and Thailand, a heartbreaking position to be in for the 2023 ASEAN chair.

This bitter outing implies the increasingly excessive consolidation of power in the hands of a few elites, accompanied by intensive restrictions on civic space. The situation has resulted from the public repeatedly being exposed to practices of power abuse that apparently use legitimate legal instruments to weaken the legislature, civil society and law enforcement institutions.

In the last year alone, these actions have undermined constitutional morality and democratic principles through state capture. The symptoms of this legal crisis are also worsened by the increased blocking of critics, the diminished deliberative function of the House of Representatives due to inferior opposition, the mounting problems surrounding the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) from institutional, ethical and leadership complications two years after the enactment of KPK Law No. 19/2019, as well as the increasingly narrow space for civil liberties.

Law enforcement institutions like the police, the Attorney General’s Office and the KPK, as well as the courts and correctional institutions, never tire of showing the crisis of integrity and morality that surrounds them. The court process is also at rock bottom due to disparities in punishment, complemented by widespread reduction in sentences for corruption convictions. The integrity of the judiciary’s last bastion, the Supreme Court, also has been tarnished due to a bribery case involving one of its justices.

This setback has been accelerated by the proliferation of trading in influence in the political system and the bureaucracy. At the same time, supervisory instruments have generally become dysfunctional due to an expansion of executive discretion.

The weak checks and balances in Indonesia’s democracy hit its lowest point when the independence of the judiciary was attacked in what has been dubbed the “Mahkamah Keluarga” scandal. This was a play on the Constitutional Court’s abbreviation MK to mean “Court of the First Family”, following its recent decision that opened the way for President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, to run for vice president in the February 2024 election.

As such, there does not seem to be any line that respects the principle of limiting power.

These dangerous signs that result from conscious breaches have the potential to continue to erode the fundamental rights of citizens ahead of the 2024 election.

Today, it is almost accepted as normal to see public officials wearing several hats at once: leaders who are also entrepreneurs, family-run political parties, overlapping government positions and even military personnel taking civilian positions. Unfortunately, regulations to prevent conflicts of interest are entirely absent to date.

The shift in the legal and political balance on eradicating corruption is also a result of graft prevention policies. The implementation of Presidential Regulation No. 54/2018 almost four years ago did not improve the country’s anticorruption performance. This policy appears to be a “negotiation” and tends to avoid the deep-rooted problems in Indonesia that significantly impact corruption, namely political corruption.

The current “legal politics” of eradicating corruption is trapped in maintaining corruption as the status quo. The policy breakthroughs that have been made appear to work only on small-scale corruption in the fringes. However, our key fundamental problem remains political corruption, especially state capture.

This obvious mismatch between the main problem of corruption and the technocratic solutions that have been offered therefore needs to be addressed with a diagnosis that focuses on uncovering the causes and symptoms of corruption, followed by opening the space for participatory monitoring. This corrective step must break the illusion that digitalization, deregulation and debureaucratization are a panacea in eradicating corruption.

Furthermore, countries experiencing a democratic relapse like Indonesia need to immediately step up structural improvements in the formal aspects of lawmaking. This means that policy formulation must not only be a truly transparent and accountable process, but also guarantee citizens’ right to participate meaningfully. Guaranteeing meaningful public access allows the monitoring of any possibility that a policy can be taken over for the benefit of a few parties.

Then, Indonesia needs to restrengthen its supervisory institutions that are currently in limbo, particularly as regards their authority, resources and independence. These institutions are the KPK, the National Police Commission and the Prosecutor’s Commission. At the same time, the government needs to continue to support the one-roof system implemented by the Supreme Court to strengthen the ends of legal reform. The principle of checks and balances will only become a figment if the court is not given the necessary authority, and its independence can be disrupted at any time.

In the end, the opaque facts above need to be followed up by reprioritizing the recommendations for improving the implementation of the UNCAC in Indonesia. There need to be additional regulations for offenses as yet unregulated in the existing Corruption Law, including bribery of foreign public officials and officials of international organizations, bribery in the private sector, trading in influence and illicit enrichment.

Another chain that needs to be unraveled is the revival of the Criminal Procedure Code Bill and judicial regulations such as the Judiciary Law, the General Courts Law, the Supreme Court Law and the Judicial Commission Law toward better harmonization.

The war against corruption also requires revising 76 percent of the existing laws, including the Corruption Law, the Income Tax Law, the Asset Confiscation Law, the Goods and Services Procurement Law, the Mutual Legal Assistance Law and the Extradition Law.

This corruption catastrophe needs progressive leadership and breakthroughs to prevent further doom to justice in the country. The long list of work to be done for the 20th anniversary of UNCAC in Indonesia can be a reminder that the global community is watching, to see if Indonesia will increasingly recede from or return to the fight in eradicating corruption.