Rights groups criticize resumption of executions in Indonesia

Rights activists inside and outside Indonesia have expressed alarm after the country executed six people in January, officially resuming the death penalty after a one-year reprieve.

On Jan. 29, the government named the next 11 people to be executed, eight of them on drug-related charges, and, of those eight, seven are foreigners.

In 2013, after an almost five-year gap, the Southeast Asian country executed five people, then held off for a year before executing six people at the start of this year, putting on notice about 150 people currently on Indonesian death row.

Some activists said the move is largely about domestic politics. Ricky Gunawan, director of the Jakarta-based LBH Masyarakat Community Legal Aid Institute, told Al Jazeera there is widespread domestic support for capital punishment for drug trafficking within Indonesia.

"In Indonesia, drugs have always been seen as 'evil.' Narcotics … are often labeled as haram [forbidden],” Gunawan said, adding that "the government and law apparatus treat this issue as a way to gain popularity or support." 

Arrests, convictions and executions are "a way for the government to show that they are tough against crimes," Gunawan said.

When Indonesian President Joko Widodo spoke about the fate of two Australians — Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, who are among the next 11 to be executed — he told CNN, "We are not going to compromise for drug dealers. No compromise, no compromise."

Widodo, who took office in the predominantly Muslim nation of roughly 250 million in October, said the two would not receive a reprieve from execution, although both men filed a last-ditch appeal on Friday.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has personally asked for clemency for Chan and Sukimaran, who were arrested in 2005.

Relations between the two neighbor countries have soured since it was revealed in 2013 that Australia had been spying on Indonesian officials, including former president President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife.

In its 2013 Death Sentence and Executions report, Amnesty International indicated that there were at least 149 people on death row in Indonesia, roughly half on drug-related charges.

Rights groups say that executing people on drug charges does not comport with international standards. 

Article 6 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights limits the acceptable use of capital punishment to crimes that meet the threshold for being "the most serious crimes."

"According to international human rights jurisprudence, capital punishment could only be applied to the crime of murder or intentional killing," Ravina Shamdasani, a spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a Jan. 20 statement.

The Indonesian government has staunchly resisted the U.N.’s interpretation of jurisprudence, which is why some rights groups focus on opposition to executions rather than the offenses for which prisoners are being executed.

"Amnesty International opposes the death penalty for whatever reason, so it doesn’t matter if [the charge] falls under a heinous crime or not," said T. Kumar, international advocacy director for the rights group.

"The death penalty is commonly used for drug offenses in many countries, mainly in Southeast Asia, so that’s nothing new there,” Kumar said. “So what’s new is we have a new president in Indonesia so he’s carrying out all the death sentences, and refusing to give any consideration for clemency — he’s pretty much taking a tough line."

Rights activists questioned the effectiveness of that hardline approach when it comes to curbing the flow of narcotics into the country.

Rick Lines, director of Harm Reduction International (HRI), a U.K.-based NGO, said that after decades of study, criminologists and social scientists have found “no evidence at all that the death penalty is a deterrent of crime, whether drug crimes or other crimes.”

"The fact that the majority of those arrested and sentenced to death are low-level couriers in and of itself demonstrates the ineffectiveness of the laws, as high-level traffickers and kingpins are not being caught in the legal net leads to capital punishment," Lines said.

He added that executing the couriers would not stop the drug trade, “as there will be a never-ending procession of poor and desperate people" willing to assume the risk for financial or other rewards. 

HRI estimates that as many as 1,000 people are executed on drug charges each year in the Middle East and Asia alone.

Al Jazeera and wire agencies