Jakarta, IO – The decision of the General Elections Commission (KPU) to remove the obligation of election participants to submit report of campaign finance or political contributions was decried by the Indonesian Community Coalition Against Corruption for Elections.
The coalition consists of 144 civil society organizations feared the decision can potentially undermine transparency and accountability in 2024 elections.
“We view that good legal traditions, which are clearly mitigative in nature, to prevent corruption should be continued, not abolished,” said the group’s spokesperson Valentina Sagala, Monday (19/6).
Valencia explained that the rules on campaign finance has been drafted by the KPU since 2014. These rules were considered a legal basis that had to be maintained to avoid corruption because the origins of the funds can be traced.
“The regulation regarding campaign finance was actually a groundbreaking policy by the KPU enacted to prevent corruption and illegal funds in campaigns. We fear this decision will worsen Indonesia’s already bad corruption perception index in 2022,” she explained.
She added that the group had a meeting with the Elections Supervisory Agency (Bawaslu) this morning. According to her, Bawaslu accepted the proposed demands and would seek further discussions.
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However, the demands put forward since the beginning of this month have not produced significant progress and the Bawaslu has not been able to provide concrete steps.
Previously, KPU announced the reason for removing the provision because it was not regulated in Law 7/2017 on General Elections. Another reason being the short campaign period has made it difficult to submit the report in a timely manner. This is because the 2024 election campaign is 75 days shorter (November 28, 2023 to February 10, 2024) compared to the 2019 elections. (bp)