Corruption Control Without Human Rights Safeguards Produces Injustice, Not Accountability -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

For long, the global battle against corruption has emerged as one of our eras most politically heralded legal endeavors. The public calls for immediate deterrence, governments promise “zero tolerance” and institutions widen the scope of enforcement. But hiding under this moral consensus is a grim reality: fighting corruption by violating human rights does not bring justice; it creates another form of injustice in the name of accountability.

Corruption is undeniably corrosive. It warps public policy, siphons off resources from more-needed endeavors and exacerbates inequity. However, the urgency to eradicate it has provoked an equally corrosive legal overreach. In many jurisdictions, anti-corruption frameworks have become tools of unrestrained power: pretrial detention that exceeds any reasonable time for trial is justified as “investigative necessity,” asset seizures are implemented without adequate judicial oversight, and convictions rest on dubious or methodologically indefensible evidence.

This is not accountability. It is reminiscent of coercion packaged as reform.

The main failure is an abandonment of human rights as the structure for anti corruption law. Due process more and more is seen as an annoyance rather than an actual right. Public narratives that equate accusation to guilt undermine the presumption of innocence. In particular, courts that defer too readily to prosecutorial representations in complex financial cases undermine a basic right of adversarial contestation, the presumption inherent in any popular version trial process and which speaks directly both to law’s legitimacy & is vital for judicial systems.

The consequences are profound. When an investigative report, especially financial or audit-based findings turned from evidentiary inputs to determinative proof without serious testing and evaluation of competing positions the wall separating administrative conclusion collapses into criminal liability. Numbers replace narrative. Calculations replace causation. And the law, rather than question evidence, rubberstamps it.

In such a system, error is not an exception, error is part of the structure.

The political aspect is even worse. Anti corruption laws, if stripped of human rights protections, make inviting instruments for arbitrariness. This provides governments with a narrative clean governance to sell, while also allowing selective targeting of political opponents and journalists or discontented voices. Enforcement may just be a form of control. Disguised as justice, it can be a form of repression.

History gives an unchanging forewarning; rules without guards do not stay unbiased. They gravitate toward power.

To this end, international human rights law already provides the required framework to avoid such distortion. The right to liberty protects against arbitrary detention. Equal arms and independent adjudication are part of the right to a fair trial The legality principle specfies that crime can only be founds if it clearly and strictly defined. Those are not lofty principles, those are working safeguards against the abuses that are already occurring in service of anti corruption now.

These principles, however, are often neglected in practice. Efficiency is prioritized over fairness. This is where conviction rates become a measure of success. Procedural shortcuts are normalized. This has produced a model which may look like it works in the short-term but is intrinsically unsustainable. Justice is not the number punished, but how punishment bands from there.

The solution is not weakening anti-corruption efforts but regulating them. Accountability should be rooted in rights, not power. This requires structural recalibration.

You strengthen, not weaken evidentiary standards. They need to pass through stringent tests of admissibility, including transparency in the methodology used, verifiability of data and rights for independent scrutiny. No report no matter how high its claimed authority is beyond dispute.

Second, one of the defenders procedures must be a core requirement. Pretrial detention has to be reserved for exceptional circumstances, not employed as a default measure. You have to connect the asset recovery with due process so that no property rights are waived in favour of expediency. Judicial reasoning must deal with whether particular evidence can be relied upon, not simply if it exists.

For third, oversight mechanisms must be neutral and enforceable. The way it is, anti corruption institutions cannot function in a void of accountability. Power is consolidated in a bubble and with it the importunity to misuse.

Finally, the story must change globally. The normalization of the fighting-both human rights and corruption like impunity is not an excuse to weaken them, it means that whether legal systems are able to uphold such principles under duress. A system that is not able to do this does not show strength. It reveals fragility.

The big question here is not whether corruption should be punished. The issue is whether the methods of punishment for it are themselves just.

Because when the struggle against corruption kicks human rights to latter, injustice are not eradicated. It reproduces it systematically, powerfully, and therefore infinitely more perilously.

The rule of law cannot exist in a legal system that punishes without protections.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia