I am Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo

Bluntly put, these guys are just wasting the (Indonesian) courts’ time. Indonesia’s judiciary has already stated that its death penalty provisions do not conflict with its international (1988) obligations and therefore any petitioner’s claims are without foundation. Furthermore, judges also found that foreign petitioners do not have legal standing in such matters.

Pretty cut and dried isn’t it?

Failing to convince Indonesia to yield to the UN and in the process force them to flush their own domestic laws down the toilet, some Australians (including politicians and the clergy) have resorted to reeling in the likes of Amnesty International, an organization whose star has fallen far after it emerged that in the United Kingdom that AI collaborated with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, So polarizing to the U.K. public and so toxic to AI staff was the relationship between AI’s leadership and Begg that one of AI’s senior staff, resigned in disgust. Salman Rushie chimed in as well deploring AI consorting with the former Gitmo inmate.

When it comes to AI, few Australians will forget the sludge pumped by the NGO, which on Prime Minister John Howard’s watch, infamously excoriated  Australia’s human rights record, compared Howard to Zimbabwe’s dictatorial Robert Mugabe and simultaneously gave a free pass to North Korea.

The very same AI that had the gall to condemn Howard’s portrayal of some “asylum seekers” (really, illegal, uninvited arrivals) as a “threat to national security”, assiduously lobbied the Department of Immigration to grant residency to Man Haron Monis (also known as Sheikh Haron and Mohamed Hassan Manteghi).

Enough said.

Perhaps well-meaning Australian abolitionists should be more prudent about the company they keep.

South East Asia is a leading drug producing area. With this come great responsibilities for governments. Not least, solving narcotic-trafficking and illicit use. Anti-narcotic laws of Indonesia along with that of her ASEAN siblings allows for preventive detention, the seizure of major drug traffickers and the confiscation of passports of convicted drug traffickers. Therefore it is not surprising that in this region, capital punishment is commonly used as a method to keep the narcotic drug trade under control.

Everybody visiting or even stopping over for a day in Denpasar, Kuala Lumpur or Singapore can see that the region’s cultures and traditions differ from those of the West. Surely they are they no less valid than those of the West.

The laws in effect in such countries must be judged with those cultures in mind.

For the record, some twenty two years ago, in 1993, in Bangkok at an Asian regional meeting, pursuant to General Assembly resolution 46/116, South East Asian nations refused, that’s right, refused, to accept what passes for so-called “international human rights standards” in Asia.

Jokowi has been consistent all along. He considers drug crimes to be a clear and present danger to the republic’s national security and social fibre. Drug trafficking is a very serious crime in Indonesia he contends, in which the death penalty is proportionate to the gravity of the offense.