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Indonesia: Nine more to be executed in Indonesia
Amnesty International Urgent Action - April 29, 2013
Nine people are at risk of execution in Indonesia, as the state has resumed executions. According to the Attorney General's Office, the execution of Adami Wilson on 14 March was only the first of 10 executions to be carried out in 2013. Indonesia has carried out its first execution since November 2008. A Malawian national, Adami Wilson, was executed by firing squad on 14 March: he had been sentenced to death in 2004 for trafficking drugs. Following the execution, the Attorney General announced that the authorities planned to execute at least nine other people under sentence of death in 2013. According to the Attorney General's Office, three of these nine were sentenced to death for drug-related offences and six for premeditated murder. The authorities have not revealed the names of the nine or their execution dates, but all are believed to have exhausted all their appeals.
Death sentences in Indonesia are carried out by firing squad. The condemned prisoner has the choice of standing or sitting and whether to have their eyes covered, by a blindfold or hood. Firing squads are made up of 12 people, three of whose rifles are loaded with live ammunition, while the other nine are loaded with blanks. The squad fires from a distance of between five and 10 metres.
There are at least 130 people under sentence of death in Indonesia. Around half of those on death row, many of whom are foreign nationals, have been convicted of drug-related offences. So far in 2013 at least six people have been sentenced to death. At least 12 people were sentenced to death in 2012.
Please write immediately in English, Indonesian or your own language: ? Calling on the authorities to halt executions immediately and commute all outstanding death sentences to terms of imprisonment; ? Urging them to establish an immediate moratorium on executions, with a view to abolishing the death penalty; ? Calling on them to release information on the number of prisoners under sentence of death in Indonesia and disclose their names and other relevant information to their families; ? Pointing out that the decision to resume executions has set Indonesia against global trends towards abolition of the death penalty.
Please send appeals before 10 June 2013 to:
Additional information
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 (news of the execution was only received after it had already taken place, no Urgent Action was released, but please see Amnesty International news story: http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/indonesia-first-execution-four- years-shocking-and-regressive-2013-03-15). 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 need for governments to deal with murder, drug trafficking and other serious crimes, but believes the death penalty does not provide a solution. There is no clear 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. Article 6(2) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) restricts the use of the death penalty to "the most serious crimes" which has been interpreted as meaning crimes involving intentional killing. 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 the global trend against the use of the death penalty, powerfully expressed most recently in the UN General Assembly's 20 December 2012 resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty. At the voting, Indonesia for the first time abstained from voting against a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the death penalty. Today 140 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or practice: in the Asia-Pacific region, 28 out of 41 states are abolitionist in law or practice.
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