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Amnesty: Filep Karma detention was travesty of justice
Jakarta Globe - November 20, 2015
"Filep Karma spent more than a decade of his life in jail when he shouldn't even have been jailed for a day. It was an outrageous travesty of justice and he should never have been brought to court," Josef Benedict, Amnesty's campaigns director for Southeast Asia, said in a press statement.
"Every Indonesian should have the right to freely express themselves and to the right to freely assemble but these rights were cruelly denied to Filep Karma," Benedict added.
Indonesia's chief of National Police, Gen. Badrodin Haiti, said separately that Filep had been released in accordance with the law, but that he had been rightfully detained. "If you say he's a political prisoner, I say [Filep was] a criminal," Badrodin said on Thursday.
Filep was arrested in 2004 after leading a peaceful demonstration in Jayapura, West Papua, calling for independence from Indonesia and raising the Morning Star flag.
He was sentenced to 15 years in prison for rebellion and refused to accept an offer of pardon earlier this year in exchange for an admission of guilt. He walked out of prison on Thursday after a sentence cut for good behavior, but has vowed to continue his peaceful struggle for Papuan independence.
Badrodin said police would keep an eye an on him, even though the situation in Papua at the moment was stable.
Amnesty said it hoped the activist's release "signals a move away from the repressive tactics frequently used by the authorities to silence peaceful dissent in the Papuan region."
[Additional reporting by Farouk Arnaz.]
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