UNITED Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday urged Indonesian President Joko Widodo to stop the scheduled executions of 10 convicted drug smugglers including Filipino Mary Jane Veloso.
“Under international law, if the death penalty is to be used at all, it should only be imposed for the most serious crimes, namely those involving intentional killing and only with appropriate safeguards,” Ban said.
Indonesia has set April 28 as the execution date for the 10 convicts and has ignored all international appeals to spare their lives.
But Ban said “drug-related offenses generally are not considered to fall under the category of ‘most serious crimes’.”
He appealed to Widodo “to urgently consider declaring a moratorium on capital punishment in Indonesia, with a view toward abolition.”
Human Rights Watch earlier criticized Widodo’s stance against the convicts, saying “Indonesia’s use of the death penalty is inconsistent with international human rights law.”
“Human rights law upholds every human being’s ‘inherent right to life’ and limits the death penalty to ‘the most serious crimes,’ typically crimes resulting in death or serious bodily harm,” said Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.
In a statement on Saturday, Kine said Widodo “should recognize that the death penalty is not a crime deterrent but an unjustifiable and barbaric punishment.”
“Indonesia should join the many countries already committed to the UN General Assembly’s December 18, 2007 resolution calling for a moratorium on executions and a move by UN member countries toward the abolition of the death penalty,” Kine said.
they hold a vigil near the Indonesian Embassy for convicted drug
smuggler Mary Jane Veloso who is scheduled to be executed on
April 28. Danny Pata
“The UN Human Rights Committee and the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions have concluded that the death penalty for drug offenses fails to meet the condition of ‘most serious crime,’” Kine said.
Widodo “should promote Indonesia as a rights-respecting democracy by joining the countries that have abolished capital punishment.”
Kine said the looming execution of 10 drug smugglers in Indonesia “have provoked a diplomatic firestorm from foreign governments whose nationals are scheduled to face the firing squad.
“The Brazilian government has expressed concern that its citizen Rodrigo Gularte faces execution despite evidence that he has bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia. In 2000 the United Nations Commission on Human Rights expressed its opposition to imposing the death penalty “on a person suffering from any form of mental disorder,” Kine said.
“Widodo has sought to justify the death penalty spree on the basis that drug traffickers on death row had ‘destroyed the future of the nation.’ In December he told students that the death penalty for convicted drug traffickers was an ‘important shock therapy’ for anyone who violates Indonesia’s drug laws,” Human Rights Watch said.
“According to the Attorney General’s Office statistics, 136 people were on death row in Indonesia at the end of 2014, of whom 64 have been convicted of drug trafficking, 2 for terrorism, and the rest for murder and robbery.”