Minister Underplays U.N. Outcry against Planned Executions

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Home Affairs Minister Tjahjo Kumolo said it was normal for any nation or the United Nations to abhor the country’s planned executions of drug convicts, but also underscored that they must respect the Indonesian law.

“By all means, but Indonesia has law sovereignty,” Tjahjo said at the Home Affairs Ministry building on Monday, April 27, 2015.

Earlier, U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon appealed to Indonesia to scrap the imminent executions of ten drug convicts—two of them Australians. Ban said the U.N. was against death penalty.

A spokesperson for Ban said the U.N. sec-gen had urged President Joko Widodo to reconsider the executions and announce a moratorium on the country’s death penalty that was directed to abolition.

Meanwhile, Tjahjo said narcotics had claimed lives of Indonesians, particularly of the young generation, and that the country was now under narcotics emergency.

“Even if there are a thousand U.N. sec-gens, Pak Jokowi and the court have made a decision, and we have the legal facts. This has to be processed immediately.”

Previously, the Attorney General’s Office’s (AGO) chief of information and legal division, Tony Spontana, said the second batch of the executions would consist nine inmates instead of the planned ten—in light of French condemned inmate Serge Areski Atlaoui’s lodging an appeal with the State Administrative Court (PTUN) to dodge the firing squad. 

TIKA PRIMANDARI