'Unlawfulness' and corruption under Indonesian law

Simon Butt

Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, 2009, vol. 45, issue 2, 179-198

Abstract: Indonesia's Anti-Corruption Commission and Anti-Corruption Court have a conviction rate of 100% in the 100 or so cases processed thus far. Some of those convicted for corruption have successfully challenged the constitutionality of Indonesia's anti-corruption framework in the Constitutional Court. This article discusses the impact of one Constitutional Court decision, which removed some flexibility from the definition of corruption under the Corruption Eradication Law. That flexibility had allowed defendants to be convicted for corruption if they had caused loss to the state and enriched another party and, in so doing, had breached 'community standards'. The Constitutional Court decided that 'community standards' was too vague and uncertain a notion to ground a conviction for corruption. This article shows that the Supreme Court has, deliberately and explicitly, circumvented the Constitutional Court's decision. That may have strengthened Indonesia's anti-corruption drive, but it has done so at the expense of the rule of law.

Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00074910903040328 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:bindes:v:45:y:2009:i:2:p:179-198

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CBIE20

DOI: 10.1080/00074910903040328

Access Statistics for this article

Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies is currently edited by Firman Witoelar Kartaadipoetra, Arianto Patunru, Robert Sparrow, Sarah Xue Dong and Sean Muir

More articles in Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().