M

ore groups have pressed the government to abolish capital punishment in the country, arguing that such a move could help ease the process of saving migrant workers from facing execution overseas.

Anis Hidayah, director of the NGO Migrant Care, said on Saturday that Indonesia was among only 37 countries worldwide that continued to use capital punishment. At the same time, the country had hundreds of migrant workers facing the threat of being executed abroad.

'€œApart from showing how weak our commitment is to enforcing human rights, the practice also weakens our diplomatic position in negotiating for the freedom of migrant workers who are facing the death penalty,'€ Anies told reporters.

According to data from Migrant care, there are currently 281 Indonesians who have either been sentenced to death or might be given a death sentence abroad. The largest number of Indonesian migrant workers facing the death penalty abroad are located in Malaysia. 212 Indonesians are presently undergoing trial, and 73 have already been sentenced.  

'€œThe government'€™s actions so far have only ever been reactive; when foreign authorities plan to carry out the punishment, the government pays a hefty sum for diyat [blood money]. There are many more that the government were unable to save,'€ she said.

Anis said that the government had failed to save two migrant workers, Siti Zaenab and Karni, from execution in April in Saudi Arabia, shortly after Indonesia'€™s first batch of executions took place in January.

Anis acknowledged that the government had made some efforts to protect migrant workers by signing a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) earlier this year that banned the export of newly recruited migrant workers to 21 countries in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. The MoU was signed in response to a long list of problems, including those related to rights violations and legal issues.

However, Anis said that the move would be ineffective if the government did not show any commitment toward abolishing the death penalty.

When asked whether Indonesia would ease off on its application of capital punishment for the sake of migrant workers on deathrow, Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said that there was no correlation between the two issues.

'€œThose two points should not be directly compared to one another. The first issue has to do with the rule of law that applies in one particular country, while the other is a nation'€™s responsibility to put in the maximum effort to protect the rights of its citizens. This is a responsibility that all nations share; Indonesia is no exception,'€ she told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

Previously, the ministry'€™s director for the protection of Indonesian nationals and entities abroad, Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, said the only way to protect migrant workers was to ban Indonesia'€™s informal workers from working in a number of Middle Eastern countries.

Iqbal said that the policy should be implemented in concert with improvements in the system that provided protection for workers in foreign countries.

Theresia Sri Endras Iswarini, a programme officer for the non-governmental development organization Hivos, said that the agreement signed by the Indonesian government and the Middle Eastern countries had only made it more likely that migrant workers would become victims of trafficking.

According to an ongoing survey conducted by Hivos, 765 out of 1,650 migrant workers interviewed at the Soekarno-Hatta International Airport were new recruits that would work in the informal sector, which violated the MoU because it only allowed re-entry workers to work in Middle Eastern countries.

'€œThis situation shows that the moratorium on the Middle East has not been put into practice and lacks any supervision,'€ she said.

The survey also shows that a whopping 610 responders had limited means of communication as they did not own cellular phones, while 99.3 percent of those who owned the device relied only on text messaging services.

'€œMigrating to work is a right and the MoU violates that right. Abolition of the death penalty would definitely bring benefits to the government in its efforts to save its people,'€ she said.