Among those waiting on death row in Indonesian jails are two Australians - the Bali nine drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran - each of whom has recently applied for clemency from the Indonesian President.
But in the past few weeks there have been indications that at the highest political levels, Indonesia is tentatively moving to reject the death penalty.
Last week it was revealed that against the advice of the Supreme Court, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had granted clemency to the drug trafficker Deni Setia Maharwa, sentenced to death for trying to smuggle 3.5 kilograms of heroin and three kilograms of cocaine to London in 2000.
The following day it emerged that, between 2004 and 2011, Yudhoyono had reduced to life imprisonment the death sentences of four people.
The Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa, said pointedly that most of the world had now abolished it and Indonesia was in the minority.
Just a week or two earlier, it had been revealed that the Supreme Court judge Imron Anwari reduced the death sentence of another drug trafficker to 15 years in prison, citing the ''right to life'' provisions in the constitution.
A strong public reaction to these events has left no doubt that many citizens, as well as police, politicians and prosecutors, regard any move towards clemency as a sign of fatal weakness.
They are backed by the country's influential Islamic groups, including the 30 million-strong Nahdlatul Ulama, whose deputy chairman, Masdar Farid Mas'udi, wrote recently that, in the absence of remorse, ''capital punishment is the best for [the criminal], for the people and for the state''.
''This is the dilemma,'' the human rights lawyer Dr Todung Mulya Lubis said this week.
''I appreciate the clemency granted by the President because I think it is a good step in the right direction.''
On the other hand, he said, the government did not want to abolish the death penalty now.
Yudhoyono's apparent solution to this dilemma is to have what Lubis
calls an ''unstated moratorium'' on people being put to death.
The Indonesia watcher Professor Tim Lindsey agrees that Yudhoyono may be ''doing good by stealth''.
''Five years ago there was almost no support in government
circles for abolition but there's been whole series of minor
concessions,'' Lindsey says.
The biggest single driver, though, is something happening in
other countries: the brutal way Indonesian maids working in Malaysia or
Saudi Arabia have been treated on death row in those countries.
One case in particular, of the 54-year-old maid Ruyati binti
Sapubi, prompted popular outrage after she was publicly beheaded in
Saudi Arabia in June, then her body was dangled from a helicopter in
punishment for murdering her abusive mistress.
Source: smh.com.au, October 27, 2012
