![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4u3wqcSA2_9oS_83hxPXelW_6BYeYR2pp4qpFtNHz5XiH0JRNfh0Zfyc-7Kmf_OF4Tl0zR5KuWFKDDTba701jJFwrNu5iYgRtne0tVhGdi7gYI5Rwnyb-S4mEb9Wz2XokEecLn5skjkc/s1600/Indonesia's+seventh+President+Joko+Widodo.jpg) |
President Widodo |
Indonesian president Joko Widodo has defiantly defended his reasons for refusing to let two Australians and other convicted drug smugglers off death row.
Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, the ringleaders of the so-called Bali Nine group of heroin smugglers, have been denied presidential pardons and are due to face a firing squad this month.
A lawyer representing them filed the application for an appeal against Mr Widodo's clemency refusal at the State Administrative Court in East Jakarta on Tuesday.
Mr Widodo, who has a policy of denying clemency for all drug offenders, said he had rejected 64 bids for clemency and was not forgiving any drug criminal.
"Every day 50 people die from narcotics," Mr Widodo said at an Islamic congress in Yogyakarta.
"Then there's 4.5 million drug addicts who need rehabilitation. This is a very big problem."
Those figures have been disputed as being based on dubious calculations, but the president has relied on them to justify his flat refusal.
"That's why the presidential clemency requests that came onto my desk — there were 64 — I signed all of them, but rejected them," he said.
"The decision to give the death sentence wasn't the president's, it was the judge in the court.
"The president is just not giving forgiveness, not giving any clemency."
Indonesia's attorney-general Muhammad Prasetyo said this week he expected the challenge to fail, as clemency rejection is the president's right.
"Clemency is a prerogative right that cannot be obstructed by anybody, can not be challenged by anybody. It's a prerogative right," Mr Prasetyo said.
Lawyers say they dispute process, not result
But one of the Australian men's lawyers, Ponti Azani, said they were disputing the process, not the result.
"We don't mean to force the president to accept the clemency requests," he said.
"But if he had to reissue the clemency, if ruled by this court, we want him to do assessments person by person — in this case Andrew and Myuran's."
It is a
last-ditch effort to get a stay on the executions and force the president to reconsider the cases individually.
Source: 7 News, February 12, 2015 (local time)