Australia yesterday denied that it had agreed to treat young Indonesian people smugglers more leniently in return for Indonesia reducing the prison sentence of a high-profile Australian drug trafficker.
However, Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr conceded that Indonesians saw a link between the treatment of Australian Schapelle Corby and young Indonesians held in Australian prisons.
Corby, 34, learned in a Bali prison on Tuesday that Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had granted a five-year reduction of a 20-year sentence for her 2005 conviction for smuggling marijuana onto the island.
Photo: AFP
Her lawyer said that since several other cuts to her sentence were approved previously, she could be freed in about three months.
The successful bid for clemency comes a week after Australia released three young Indonesians from prison based on new evidence that they might not be adults. Crew members of Indonesian people smuggling boats who illegally bring asylum-seekers to Australia are sent home without punishment if they are children.
Indonesian State Secretary Sudi Silalahi said Corby’s sentence reduction was part of a reciprocal deal in which Australia would be more lenient toward young Indonesians arrested for crewing asylum seeker boats.
Indonesian Minister for Justice and Human Rights Amir Syamsuddin also said the sentence reduction should encourage Australia to release more young Indonesians held in prison.
“That’s how the Indonesians see it,” Carr said, but he denied that Australia’s decision was part of any reciprocal agreement.
“We’d be making that decision about those minors if there were no Schapelle Corby and indeed no Australians serving time in Indonesian jails,” Carr said. “We’d be doing it because it’s unconscionable to hold minors in adult prisons.”
“If that’s created a level of goodwill in Indonesia that has helped make this decision possible, then that’s fine,” he added.
He said both Corby and the incarceration of young Indonesians in Australia were on the agenda of a bilateral summit involving foreign and defense ministers in Canberra in March.
He said Australia had undertaken to release Indonesian prisoners if evidence emerged that they were minors.
“In all sincerity, they can see the issues as being linked, but for our own part, we would have been making the decision on minors if there were no Australians in any Indonesian prison,” Carr said.
Corby’s lawyer, Iskandar Nawing, said Indonesian authorities agreed to reduce her sentence because of her poor mental state.
Corby’s case has attracted intense and sustained attention in Australia, where many people believe she is innocent of the crime which she has consistently denied. To be “schapelled” has emerged as Australian slang for suffering a harsh injustice.
Corby maintains she does not know how 4.2kg of marijuana came to be found in her surfboard bag when it was searched on arrival at Denpasar Airport in late 2004.
She has since published an autobiography from prison in 2006 and has twice been hospitalized for depression in 2008 and 2009.
Corby’s mother, Rosleigh Rose, yesterday told reporters outside her home at the Australian east coast city of Logan that she would fly to Bali in July and “will be bringing her home.”
“I think it hasn’t sunk in yet. I can’t believe it,” Rose said in a statement, referring to the reduced sentence.
Indonesian law expert Tim Lindsay, director of Melbourne University’s Asian Law Center, said the clemency decision was good news for other Australian prisoners in Indonesia, including two on death row for heroin trafficking.
“The president ... has on many occasions indicated he would not use his power of clemency in favor of drug offenders,” Lindsay told Australian Broadcasting Corp. “He’s just done so and he’s done so to a very significant degree.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS