T

o mark World Day Against the Death Penalty, which falls on Oct. 10, United Nations human rights experts have issued a joint statement calling for urgent action to end the death penalty, which they say has been unfairly used against the poor.

“If you are poor, the chances of being sentenced to death are immensely higher than if you are rich. There could be no greater indictment of the death penalty than the fact that in practice it is really a penalty reserved for people from lower socio-economic groups,” the statement, issued on Friday, said.

But the UN experts’ argument — despite its resonance with Indonesia’s situation where many of its poorer citizens can easily fall victim to miscarriages of justice — seems to have hardly swayed the country’s stance on capital punishment.

Global calls for Indonesia to impose a moratorium on executions in recent years have consistently fallen on deaf ears with President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, facing domestic pressures to address drug-related crimes, opting to keep the country among a small number of nations in the world that has chosen to retain the death penalty.

Jokowi, widely portrayed as the man of the people, has implied that he is not against imposing a moratorium on executions, but that he has to consider what the people want.

In an interview with AFP in March, when Jokowi was asked whether he would consider a moratorium, he said: “Why not? But I must ask my people. If my people say OK, they say yes, I will start to prepare.”

A number of political decisions made by his government this year, however, have shown that the idea of abolition seems to remain highly unpopular among Indonesians, despite criticism leveled mainly against the nation’s broken criminal justice system.

In August, Attorney General Muhammad Prasetyo said he was waiting for an edict from the Supreme Court regarding the 2016 Constitutional Court ruling scrapping a time limit for death-row inmates to request clemency from the President on the grounds that such a policy contravened the Constitution.

The court ruling, Prasetyo said, was problematic as it was used by death-row inmates to delay their executions.

“The Attorney General was seeking a new strategy [to implement] the death penalty,” Erasmus Napitupulu, a researcher at Jakarta-based legal think tank Institute for Criminal Justice and Reform (ICJR), told The Jakarta Post on Saturday.

The ruling was in the spotlight during the 2016 executions. The Indonesian Ombudsman found the execution of Nigerian Humphrey Jefferson Ejike Eleweke had taken place while he was appealing to Jokowi for clemency. The Clemency Law stipulates that an execution cannot be conducted before a final say from the president on the clemency request.

“There has to be a moratorium on death executions, so that maladministration like in the execution of Humphrey do not happen again,” said Erasmus.

The AGO has said the government is considering executing a new batch of convicts in the near future. It remains tight-lipped over the details of the plan, which would be the fourth round of executions during the Jokowi administration.

Indonesia has carried out 18 executions since Jokowi rose to power in 2014, 15 of which were of foreigners, drawing criticism from the global community and prompting calls for Indonesia to join the majority of countries banning the death penalty.

During a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin in April last year, Merkel said Indonesia was expected to take the same stance as Germany on capital punishment, but Jokowi insisted there was no intention to abolish the death penalty considering Indonesia was waging a war against narcotics. “Between 30 and 50 people die per day in Indonesia due to drug addiction problems,” Jokowi said.

There is no sign Indonesia will soften its stance against drug crimes. This year alone, the Indonesian antidrug squad has shot dead more than 80 suspected drug traffickers, according to Amnesty International.

It is no surprise that at the UN Human Rights Council meeting in September, Indonesia flatly rejected the recommendation from the 27th session of the Universal Periodic Review (UPR) that the country abolish the death penalty.

Ifdhal Kasim, a presidential adviser on political, legal and human rights matters, said Indonesia was still far from imposing a moratorium on the death penalty. “It will still be included in our law,” he told the Post.