Questions over the new Indonesian president Joko Widodo’s commitment to human rights have been raised after he signed off on the execution of five inmates on death row.
Rejecting their pleas for clemency, Widodo – popularly known as Jokowi – ordered the prisoners’ deaths by firing squad by the end of this month.
After meeting the president on Thursday, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, Tedjo Edhi Purdijatno, told reporters the inmates would be “executed as soon as possible”.
The five are reportedly all Indonesian nationals and are among more than 100 Indonesian and foreign nationals on death row.
Political analyst and director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, Sidney Jones, said the president could have commuted the sentences to life imprisonment, adding that his choice did not reflect well on the Jokowi administration.
“It seems as though some of the law and human rights and justice questions have been turned over to the hardliners of his [Jokowi’s] administration while he focuses on some of the economic and social and maritime issues, but he has got to realise that, as president, it is all going to come back to him.”
A pragmatic entrepreneur who rose from small-town politics to be elected president this July, Jokowi has been criticised for courting former generals with questionable rights backgrounds and later appointing one as his defence minister.
Haris Azhar, coordinator of the rights group Kontras, said during the first few months in office the Jokowi government has failed to prioritise human rights concerns.
“Jokowi and his government have not shown good intentions to deal with human rights abuses, including his plan to execute prisoners on death row,” said Azhar. “His government does not have a framework to address rights abuses, in the past and now.”
Over recent weeks the Jokowi government has been forced to defend its decision to release Pollycarpus Budihari Prijanto, the convicted murderer of human rights campaigner Munir Thalib.
Prijanto was sentenced to 14 years in jail after he was charged with poisoning Thalib with arsenic in 2004, but served only six years after receiving several remissions.
Before the decision to execute the five inmates there had been hope that Jokowi might abolish the death penalty, or decide to extend a moratorium on executions.
However, recent statements from the new attorney general HM Prasetyo suggest that 20 other inmates on death row will face the firing squad in 2015.
“We will carry out the executions after we complete their paper work,” Prasetyo told the Jakarta Post last week. “There is no mercy for drug dealers.”
The majority of inmates on death row in Indonesia was sentenced for drug-related offenses.
According to the National Narcotics Agency, 77 drug traffickers have been on death row since 2004 and nine have been executed. The data shows that 47 are foreign nationals.
Two Australians, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran – part of the Bali Nine smuggling ring – were sentenced to death after they were caught planning to smuggle 8.3kg (18lbs) of heroin into Indonesia. The pair appealed for clemency two years ago.
