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Rights groups urge govt to abide by legal process

Criticism mounted of the government ahead of its impending second round of executions expected on Tuesday, as civil society groups demanded it respect all the legal processes that are currently being pursued by the convicts to avoid death

Tama Salim (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Mon, April 27, 2015

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Rights groups urge govt to abide by legal process

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riticism mounted of the government ahead of its impending second round of executions expected on Tuesday, as civil society groups demanded it respect all the legal processes that are currently being pursued by the convicts to avoid death.

A team of rights activists representing Brazilian death row convict Rodrigo Gularte is asking the government to postpone the execution of at least one of the 10 convicts on death row, arguing that it had to respect the regulations and wait until all legal avenues are completely exhausted, including a case review that Gularte'€™s team is lodging on Monday.

A member of Gularte'€™s legal team, Alex Argo Widoyo, said the team would lodge a new case review based on 22 pieces of new evidence not previously presented at an earlier hearing, in the hope that Gularte would be reprieved.

Alex, who is a member of the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), claimed that the new evidence would prove that Gularte was suffering from schizophrenia, a legal avenue that previously proved unsuccessful.

'€œWe have received new evidence that supports the fact that Rodrigo has been sick since 1982. On account of this, the Attorney General needs to allow for the possibility of postponement,'€ Alex told reporters in Central Jakarta, on Sunday.

Another postponement of the executions was permissible, he claimed given the fact that officials had already put them off until after the conclusion of the Asian-African Conference Commemoration (AACC) out of respect for the foreign dignitaries. '€œIf the executions were held off to accommodate the AACC, why shouldn'€™t they be postponed to accommodate legal efforts to overturn the rulings?'€

He called for the executions to be postponed at least until there was a decision regarding the case review, which will be lodged with the Tangerang District Court on Monday.

The case review, Alex continued, would challenge Gularte'€™s sentence by using Article 44 of the Criminal Code (KUHP), which stipulates that an individual suffering from mental illness must be exempt from execution. '€œUnlike the first case review, which focused on flaws in the judge'€™s judgment, we will use Rodrigo'€™s mental health as our premise,'€ he added.

A coalition of NGOs is also urging the government to halt the executions and abolish the death penalty altogether.

The coalition, called the Civil Society against Death Penalty, said the government needed to rethink its execution policy because apart from the contravention of human rights, the legal process against those convicted had been flawed.

'€œIn the case of Mary Jane Veloso, for example, it was written [on her dossier] that she was accompanied by [lawyers] from Yogyakarta Police. In fact, they only met her during Mary'€™s trial,'€ said the head of Jakarta Legal Aid Institute (LBH Jakarta), Feby Yonesta, during a press conference at the Human Rights Working Group (HRWG) headquarters in Central Jakarta on Sunday.

He was referring to another drugs convict, from the Philippines, who is facing execution.

He also claimed that Sleman District Court, which sentenced Veloso to death, had infringed her rights as it did not provide a proper interpreter for Mary. '€œThe fact is that Mary cannot speak English. They provided an English translator but Mary could not understand all the accusations made against her because she can only understand Tagalog,'€ Feby added, referring to the Philippine language.

He warned that the failure to conduct a trial in a language comprehensible to a suspect goes against the Indonesian Criminal Law Code Procedures (KUHAP).

'€œArticle 51 of the law stipulates that in order to provide a defense, a suspect needs to be informed of all accusations made against them in a comprehensible language,'€ he said.

'€œUntil the end of the trial Mary Jane did not understand all the accusations [made against her],'€ he added. (saf)

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