Legislators’ recommendation for an ad hoc human rights court to be set up to probe past rights violations will likely be discussed in an upcoming meeting between President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and leaders of state institutions.
Djoko Suyanto, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, said he had gone over the issues that would be discussed in the meeting with the House of Representatives leaders on Tuesday.
Djoko stressed that the recommendation to set up the ad hoc human rights court had not been listed as an issue that would be discussed in the meeting, but there was a strong possibility that the topic could still emerge.
He said the meeting would center on national security issues, special autonomy in Aceh and Papua, and several laws.
At the end of previous House term in 2009, legislators recommended that the government address past human rights cases, including by setting up an ad hoc human rights court.
The issue was largely forgotten until last year, when the National Commission on Human Rights (Komnas HAM) released a landmark report alleging gross rights abuses by past governments and called for an inquest by the Attorney General’s Office.
The Komnas HAM report concluded that there was evidence of serious human rights violations and crimes against humanity during the state’s anti-communist purge of 1965-1966 and in a spate of extra-judicial killings of suspected criminals from 1982 to 1985.
President Yudhoyono initially welcomed the release of the report and ordered the AGO to follow up with a legal probe into the findings.
However, the AGO has repeatedly refused to look into the cases, claiming that the rights body has not filed the paperwork properly. Last November, Attorney General Basrief Arief said that his office could not proceed based on the dossier submitted by Komnas HAM because the evidence gathered was “insufficient to justify an official legal investigation.”
Haris Azhar, coordinator of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), said the AGO had no legitimate grounds to reject the report. He added the AGO had turned down similar cases in the past on the same pretext.
Haris said these other cases included the rape of ethnic Chinese women during the riots of May 1998, the shooting of student protesters at Jakarta’s Trisakti University in the same month, and the killing of more student protesters in November 1998 and September 1999 in the Semanggi area of South Jakarta.