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Amnesty slams RI'€™s rights record

President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo has turned expectation into disappointment as he still fails to address human rights violations as promised during his campaign, Amnesty International has said

Anggi M. Lubis (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Thu, February 25, 2016

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Amnesty slams RI'€™s rights record

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resident Joko '€œJokowi'€ Widodo has turned expectation into disappointment as he still fails to address human rights violations as promised during his campaign, Amnesty International has said.

The local chapter of the London-based human rights group said in a press briefing held Wednesday that despite the strong commitment made by Jokowi to resolve past abuses, cases remained unaddressed.

Moreover, rights violations further escalated in Jokowi'€™s first full-year leading the country, Amnesty International said in its 2015 annual report.

'€œThe headline for our report on Indonesia is that the President who came to power with a promise to address the serious human rights violations that occurred over the last couple of decades ['€¦] has yet to fulfill his promise. A year after the election, his promises have not been fulfilled,'€ Josef Roy Benedict, deputy director of campaigns for Amnesty International'€™s Southeast Asia and Pacific Office, said during the briefing in Jakarta on Wednesday.

In his presidential campaign against former army general and alleged human rights violator Prabowo Subianto, Jokowi pledged '€” among other things '€” to investigate the disappearance of 13 pro-democracy activists in the dying days of Soeharto dictatorship in 1998 and to establish an ad-hoc court to resolve past human rights violations.

'€œWe have not seen a fundamental shift,'€ Benedict said.

In the report, impunity remains under the spotlight with the human rights group highlighting, among other cases, how authorities had failed to bring the perpetrators behind the death of activist Munir Said Thalib in 2004 to justice and to address the wide variety of violations committed during 1965/1966 communist purge that resulted in the deaths of approximately one million people.

Four of the nation'€™s presidents have also failed to address past abuses. '€œBut at this rate, Jokowi will make his predecessors '€” who also failed to end impunity '€” seem much better than him at tackling human rights issues,'€ Haris Azhar of the Commission For Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), said.

With at least 131 people currently on death row, Jokowi'€™s controversial death penalty has been regarded as a serious human rights concern in the Amnesty International report. Amnesty highlighted its concern over the death penalty in 2015 when 14 prisoners were executed, 12 of them were foreign nationals and all had been convicted for drug-trafficking offences. Jokowi had said that no clemency would be considered.

Funding has already been allocated for this year'€™s execution rounds.

The human rights organization have also reported concerns over the protection of freedom of expression and religion, the excessive use of force shown by military personnel and police, which remained rampant throughout 2015, particularly in Papua, where Jokowi won by a landslide during the 2014 presidential election.

Wahyudi Djafar from the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (ELSAM) said that Indonesia was facing a crisis in freedom of expression, both online and offline, that Jokowi needed to resolve by amending related regulations to prevent criminalization. '€œThere were 40 cases of criminalization on the freedom of speech in online digital platforms in 2014 and the figure rose to 45 last year,'€ he said during the briefing.

Data from ELSAM also showed that there had been 35 cases of repression in off-line platforms, 20 of which related to 1965/1966 issues. There were also 45 instances of repression shown toward press freedom, with four media executives reported last year.

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