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Indonesian President
Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono |
Indonesia executed three convicted murderers on Friday, an official said, the second time that the country has done so since 2008 in a move that drew condemnation from rights groups.
Suryadi Swabhuana, Jurit, and Ibrahim, all Indonesians, were put to death by firing squad in Nusakambangan prison, on an island off the coast of the main island of Java.
“We executed the three men early Friday,” said Mahfud Mannan, the deputy attorney general for criminal cases. “They were convicted in two separate cases of premeditated murder.”
Swabhuana, 46, was convicted of murder and theft in 1991, according to government records.
Jurit and Ibrahim, who both go by one name like many Indonesians, were convicted of murder in a second case. Further details were not available.
Indonesia resumed executions in March, when it put a Malawian drug trafficker to death. Prior to that, in 2008 it executed three men who played key roles in the 2002 Bali bombings.
Amnesty International slammed the latest executions as a “major regressive step.”
“The executions set Indonesia against global trends towards abolition of the death penalty,” said Josef Benedict, an Indonesia campaigner at Amnesty.
“Amnesty International calls on Indonesia to make [these] executions the last.”
Andreas Harsono, from Human Rights Watch, added that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono “should immediately act to stop executions and practisce what he preaches — that Indonesia is a democracy that respects rights.”
Mannan said that Indonesia plans to execute six more people this year to meet a target of 10. He declined to give further details.
A number of foreign nationals are jailed on the resort island of Bali, mainly on drugs offences, and several are on death row.
This includes British grandmother Lindsay Sandiford who was sentenced to death in January for cocaine smuggling and two men from the “Bali Nine” group of Australians convicted of attempting to smuggle heroin.
Executions in Indonesia are usually carried out by firing squad in the middle of the night in isolated locations.
Source: Agence France-Presse, May 17, 2013
Additional Information: Amnesty International
Indonesia resumed executions on 14 March 2013 after a four year hiatus, when Adami Wilson, a 48-year-old Malawian national, was put to death for drug-trafficking. The execution was a shocking and regressive step after years of positive indications that Indonesia was moving away from the death penalty. In October 2012, after news that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono commuted the death sentence of a drug trafficker, Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said the move was part of a wider push away from the use of the death penalty in Indonesia. Also in 2012, the Supreme Court commuted the death sentence of a drug trafficker to 12 years’ imprisonment and the President granted clemency for two others who had been sentenced to death for drug trafficking.
Amnesty International recognizes the obligation and duty for governments to protect the human rights of victims of crime, and believes that those found responsible, after a fair judicial process, should be punished with a sentence that is proportionate to the crime committed, but without recourse to the death penalty. There is no convincing evidence that the death penalty deters crime any more effectively than other forms of punishment.
Amnesty International believes that the death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, and a violation of the right to life as proclaimed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to which Indonesia is a state party. Moreover, Article 6(6) of the ICCPR states that “Nothing in this article shall be invoked to delay or to prevent the abolition of capital punishment by any State Party to the present Covenant”. The Human Rights Committee, the body overseeing the implementation of the ICCPR, has stated that Article 6 "refers generally to abolition [of the death penalty] in terms which strongly suggest... that abolition is desirable. The Committee concludes that all measures of abolition should be considered as progress in the enjoyment of the right to life”.
The then UN Commission on Human Rights, in resolution 2005/59, called upon all states that still maintain the death penalty “to make available to the public information with regard to the imposition of the death penalty and to any scheduled execution”. On 23 March 2012, the UN Human Rights Council adopted resolution 19/ 37 on the “Rights of the child” in which it called on states to ensure that inmates on death row, as well as their families and legal representatives are provided, in advance, with adequate information about a pending execution, its date, time and location, to allow a last visit or communication with the convicted person.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty unreservedly in all cases and supports calls, also included in four resolutions adopted by the UN General Assembly since 2007, for the establishment of a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty. At the voting on the most recent of these resolutions in December 2012, Indonesia for the first time changed its vote from against to abstention. As of today 140 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice; in the Asia-Pacific region, out of 41 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, 17 have abolished the death penalty for all crimes, 10 are abolitionist in practice and one – Fiji – uses the death penalty only for exceptional military crimes.
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