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The police have the dishonor of being the arm of government most often reported to the National Commission on Human Rights in 2011, while land conflicts remained the most common source of violence reported.

The number of reports indicated that the overall human rights situation was not improving, according to the body assigned to handle the issue.

A summary of the trends from about 6,000 complaints filed with the rights body, known as Komnas HAM, was presented to lawmakers at a special hearing on Monday.

“Complaints about the police totaled 1,262 cases,” the head of Komnas HAM, Ifdhal Kasim, told members of House of Representatives Commission III, which oversees legal matters.

Complaints about private companies were the next most common, with 775 cases, followed by 585 cases involving local governments and 377 for justice system agencies.

In contrast to decades past, the military was further down the list, with 181 complaints. “Most of the complaints about the military related to land disputes,” Ifdhal said.

Of justice system agencies, prosecutors were the subject of 174 complaints, while 53 cases related to people being detained by prison authorities.

Ifdhal said that every year Komnas HAM received more reports than it was able to properly investigate. “In 2011, we received around 6,000 reports, but we only managed to handle around 4,000 cases,” he said.

Commenting on the number of alleged human rights violations by the police, Ifdhal said it was evidence that neither the force’s General Oversight Inspectorate (Irwasum) nor its Bureau of Professionalism and Security Affairs (Propam) were preventing officers from abusing their authority.

“Oversight by Irwasum and Propam is not working,” he said, adding that he feared the number of abuse cases would escalate unless something was done to address the problem.

The large number of land disputes relating to the exploitation of natural resource accounted for private companies finishing with the second-most number of complaints, Ifdhal said.

Alleged human rights violations arising from industrial disputes also accounted for a significant number of cases.

“The third most common source of conflict was when corporations decided to staff their operations via outsourcing,” Ifdhal said.

There were 155 complaints relating to local people being evicted to make way for natural resource extraction, he said.

A further 95 cases were over environmental damage, and there were 73 cases in which indigenous people claimed their rights had been violated.

“Overall, conflict was dominated by land disputes, but environmental issues, indigenous people and evictions also featured, which indicates there is a problem in natural resource management,” he said.

Ifdhal urged the House Commission III members present to focus on natural resource conflict issues if they wanted to decrease the number of human rights abuses taking place.

Furthermore, he said, the climate for human rights in general is worsening in Indonesia.

“Both the quality and scale of human rights abuses that occurred in 2011 were worse than the year before,” he said.

The rights body is scheduled to undergo a leadership change soon. Registration for Komnas HAM commissioners for the 2012-17 period is open until Jan. 31. A selection panel will examine the applications of candidates before forwarding its recommendations to House Commission III for approval.