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Antigraft activists testified on Monday that Busyro Muqoddas should serve out the full four years as head of the anticorruption commission, rather than the one year mandated by legislators.

Saldi Isra, a constitutional law expert from Andalas University in Padang, told the Constitutional Court that the 2002 Law on the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) clearly stated that the elected chairperson must serve a four-year term.

He added that if the House of Representatives, which selected Busyro to the KPK, had meant for him to serve in a caretaker role to round out the previous chairman’s term, then it should have stated so explicitly.

In that case, Saldi said, the House should have given the post of chairperson to the candidate with the next highest number of votes in the previous selection process.

“They shouldn’t have held a new selection process and chosen Busyro,” Saldi said.

He was testifying in the judicial review of Article 34 of the KPK Law, which states the antigraft chief may only serve a single four-year term.

Busyro was selected as chairman of the antigraft commission by the House in November, but legislators insisted he would only be serving out the remaining one year left in the tenure of former chairman Antasari Azhar, who was in March 2010 convicted of murder.

In between Antasari’s suspension and Busyro’s appointment, the KPK was headed by a presidentially appointed caretaker.

“If you read the text of the article, it’s clear that [the KPK] leadership has a four-year tenure,” Saldi said.

“Whoever he is and whenever he is appointed, he has to serve for four years.”

He added that if Busyro was made to serve only one year and thus step down at the same time as the four deputies selected alongside Antasari, that would effectively mean the entire KPK leadership had been selected as a single entity, thus undermining its independence.

“As an independent agency, its leaders should not be under the influence of any regime or executive agencies,” he said. “I want to recommend this kind of independency to other independent bodies such as the KPU [General Elections Commission].”

Erry Riyana Hardjapamengkas, a former KPK deputy chairman, also testified that he believed Busyro should have been given a full four-year term as chairman, arguing this would ensure continuity in the commission’s work.

“The sustainability [of investigations], the human resources work and the Rp 1.6 billion [$190,000] spent on Busyro’s selection process should not be wasted just like that,” he said.

“Whoever is elected, they should serve in full.”

After the hearing, Erry told reporters that when his own tenure ended in 2007, the handover to the incoming leadership consisted of only a handful of meetings.

“But such a forum isn’t enough because the KPK handles so many difficult cases and the new leadership might not be aware of certain dynamics or other developments,” he said.