Indonesia To Execute 14 Drug Convicts This Week, Most Foreign Citizens

Human Rights Watch urged Widodo to call off the executions and avoid a “potential diplomatic firestorm”, referring to the global criticism Indonesia attracted when it put to death eight drug convicts in April 2015, including two Australians and a Brazilian.

Pakistani death row prisoner Zulfiqar Ali was transferred from hospital to Nusakambangan ahead of his planned execution.

Indonesia suspended a four-year de facto moratorium on the death penalty in March 2013, in a decision that runs counter to an worldwide trend towards the abolition of the death penalty.

Mr Gunawan said that legally those prisoners who had filed for presidential clemency should be taken off the execution list because they had not exhausted all their legal avenues.

This comes after reports by the Indonesian officials that they had foreign convicts charged with drug trafficking and were enlisted to be executed.

Earlier this week, Indonesia’s attorney-general said 14 people, mostly foreigners, would be executed.

The death penalty is widely accepted by the Indonesian public, but police on Thursday had to break up a protest outside the prison by members of a migrant workers group who called for mercy for an Indonesian woman who was scheduled to be executed.

The government has put more men to death in the last two years than it has in the previous decade. Carrying out executions will not rid Indonesia of drugs.

The attorney general’s office, which oversees executions, could not be reached for comment.

Amnesty International also issued a strong statement, saying the President “will be putting his government on the wrong side of history if he proceeds with a fresh round of executions”. Even when it comes to murder, a recent study concluded that the death penalty does not deter the crime “to a marginally greater extent than does the threat and application of the supposedly lesser punishment of life imprisonment”.

The Indonesian government says the death penalty is necessary for drug crimes because the country is facing a drug epidemic, particularly affecting young people.

The drug convicts were executed by firing squad shortly after midnight local time, the BBC reports.

Worldwide, China is believed to be the country with the highest number of executions but it does not release figures.

This is all a dramatic and flawed attempt by Joko Widodo to curb drugs crime in Indonesia. The foreign ministry also defended the use of capital punishment and the legal process. Indian and Pakistani officials said they were making last-minute efforts to save their citizens.

Al Jazeera’s Vaessen said there had been “a lot of pressure” until the last minute to stop the executions.