Asset Seizure or Legal Plunder? When Anti-Corruption Targets Innocent Third Parties -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Asset seizure, a tool in the global war on corruption. Typically represented as a key tool in the effort to crack down on dirty money, confiscation regimes are highly regarded trophies of state strength. But there is an unsettling reality beneath this moral narrative: the growing dragnet of dirty money that state increasingly pursues also catches clean assets, innocent families and lawful livelihoods.

What is being sold as justice in many cases trends toward the illegal use of force. In anti corruption systems, from Indonesia’s corruption framework to more globally applied frameworks of asset-freezing and confiscation, these functions have expanded well beyond their original design. Prosecutors regularly seize not only property that they can connect to alleged corruption, but also properties held by spouses, children or businesses owned (directly or indirectly) by the accused with often minimal evidence of any connection to proceeds from crime. Quietly, the legal fiction that proximity equals complicity made itself at home.

The consequences are devastating. Money laundering is just so big and families whose only sin was to survive now have their bank accounts frozen, homes taken away from them or businesses made unviable. Employees lose jobs. Children lose access to education. Economic ecosystems collapse not because guilt was ever established, but rather that suspicion had been viciously weaponized.

This is not collateral damage. It is structural. The justification is familiar: because corruption is a crime and it is something almost extraordinary; using an exceptional measure. However, this reasoning falls apart when you investigate further. State, in order to not infringe fundamental rights cannot do it by bypassing the constitutional protection because targets of an action or legislation are unpopular. The Rights of Property and Due process (rights) and presumption of innocence are not procedural luxuries, they are the very substance that separates justice from power.

It is when the state moves to seize first, and justify later, that it crosses a very dangerous line. At the centre of this problem is gross distortion of proportionality. The asset recovery should be linked to visible illegal gain. Rather, a system of preemptive punishment is what you have instead assets confiscated based on guilt by conjunction rather than conviction. The burden of proof against third parties regarding property rightfully theirs is reversed, pushing them into lengthy legal battles to show what was lawfully in their possession.

Time compounds the injustice. People can seek legal redress against detention and seizure but those processes typically take years, leaving families and businesses in limbo. The damage remains irreversible even when the asset eventually returned. A shuttered company is not a company that just reopens. A chance tarnished identity is not restored. In this sense, justice delayed is not only injustice, properly construed as unjust delay (unjust), it is also a kind of murder by legal means.

This implies something much uglier and most troubling. Allocate absolutely excessive property seizure, in return, doesn’t just impact ordinary people who placed any breasts together with deputies; it undermines public consider throughout the anti corruption efforts themselves. The moral clarity of anti-corruption campaigns is beginning to fade when enforcement looks random. What once was viewed as a crusade against wrongdoing is in danger of being recognized as an apparatus to help the State rule over other States, and legal instruments are now used not only for punishment but also even for disciplining all aspects from society.

Which is the paradox of modern anti-corruption regimes: in trying to keep it clean, it dirties itself some more.

None of which is an argument against asset recovery. Abuse of power must be tracked down, confiscated and returned to the people. There is an important difference between focused enforcement and broad confiscation practices. When asset seizure has no proper evidential thresholds, judicial oversight and protection of third party rights it is simply legalized plunder.

The question is not whether we need action against corruption (we do). The real question of if we are willing to embrace enforcement that punishes well past the guilty, confiscates on nonproven grounds, and damn near destroys in its wake? For if it is the innocent who begin to pay, we are no longer talking about justice.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing Partner of Law Firm Victorious Indonesia