On the eve of the 10-year anniversary of the arrest of the Bali Nine drug smugglers, lawyers are still fighting to save two Australians from execution, amid suggestions it could happen soon.
Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran have been held since early March on Nusa Kambangan, the island off Java where Indonesian authorities intend to execute them for their role in the attempt to smuggle more than 8kg of heroin.
They were previously detained inside Bali’s less strict Kerobokan prison.
On Wednesday their lawyer Todung Mulya Lubis and human rights groups outlined a challenge before the constitutional court questioning President Joko Widodo’s sweeping refusal to grant clemency to drug smugglers, including the 10 scheduled to be executed next, rather than assessing individual cases. The attorney general, HM Prasetyo, said the court action applied only to future cases and would not stop the executions.
Julian McMahon, the Australian lawyer for Chan and Sukumaran, told Guardian Australia that while the eventual decision would not be retrospective “nevertheless there can be no doubt that a favourable ruling from the constitutional court should be of great significance on the question of whether these 10 prisoners should be executed”.
Some reports on comments from Prasetyo suggested the 10 executions – including the two Australians – might be carried out this month, but McMahon pointed to past statements from government.
“We certainly welcome the repeated assurance from the Indonesian authorities during this year that there would be no executions while court cases are under way,” he said. “At the moment at least several of the 10 singled out for execution are before the courts.”
A spokesman for Prasetyo, Tony Spontana, told Guardian Australia the executions would be after the Asian-African conference in Jakarta from 19 to 24 April, but could not confirm a timeframe beyond that.
Critics of Indonesia’s policy have used Saudi Arabia’s execution of an Indonesian woman on Tuesday to argue for an end to capital punishment.
Siti Zaenab had been accused of killing her employer in 1999. There was concern she was suffering from a mental illness at the time.
McMahon criticised the “brutal” execution and said it “illustrates the difficulty of Indonesia’s position in trying so hard to save its own citizens abroad while being ready to execute at home”.
“The Indonesians who work for the imprisoned overseas migrant workers are clear that executing at home makes their job much harder,” McMahon said.
Anis Hidaya, executive director of human rights group Migrant Care, said the case should give “momentum” to the Indonesian government to end capital punishment, Fairfax Media reported.
“The application of the death penalty at home will only make the government lose its moral legitimacy to urge other countries to free Indonesian nationals who are on death row.”
The Indonesians have had more success in the past three years in saving their citizens from execution around the world than any other nation, through the work of a specially created taskforce, established by the former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
