Indonesian president authorises five executions

Activists concerned over Joko Widodo’s human rights stance as government presses ahead with death penalties

Indonesian president Joko Widodo has authorised executions of five prisoners. Photograph: Oscar Siagian/Getty Images

Kate Lamb in Jakarta-Friday 5 December 2014

The Indonesian president Joko Widodo’s commitment to human rights is under question after he signed off 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.

Tedjo Edhy Purdijatno, the coordinating minister for political, legal and security affairs, said, after he met the president on Thursday, that 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.

Describing the move as a “wrong” decision when the president could have opted to commute the sentences to life, Sidney Jones, political analyst and director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, in Jakarta, 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 in 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 had failed to prioritise human rights concerns.

Andrew Chan (left) and Myuran Sukumaran were sentenced to death in Indonesia.Photograph: Jason Childs/Getty Images

“Jokowi and his government have not shown good intentions to deal with human rights abuses, including his plan to execute prisoners on death row,” Azhar said. “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 Munir Thalib, a human rights campaigner.

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 HM Prasetyo, the attorney general, suggest that 20 more inmates on death row will face the firing squad in 2015.

“We will carry out the executions after we complete their paperwork,” Prasetyo told the Jakarta Post last week. “There is no mercy for drug dealers.”

Most of the inmates on death row in Indonesia were sentenced for drug-related offences.

According to the national narcotics agency, 77 drug traffickers have been on death row since 2004 and nine have been executed. Data shows that 47 are foreign nationals.

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.