JAKARTA, Indonesia, Oct. 8 -- Human rights groups on Sunday criticized Indonesia's Supreme Court for overturning the 14-year prison sentence of a man convicted of killing the country's most prominent activist.Munir Said Thalib, a human rights lawyer who was threatened in the late 1990s after revealing abuses by the Indonesian military, died of arsenic poisoning in September 2004 on a flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam.
The Supreme Court said last Tuesday that it had seen insufficient evidence to support a decision by a lower tribunal that an off-duty pilot, Pollycarpus Budihari Priyanto, had laced Munir's food with poison.
The acquittal has angered many in Indonesia, where the case was seen as a test for a legal system still plagued by corruption after nearly three decades under dictator Suharto. The Suharto government, toppled by a popular uprising in 1998, was known for imprisoning and killing its political opponents.
"The failure to secure a conviction for Munir's murder is a huge blow for human rights protection and the reform process supposedly underway in Indonesia," Brad Adams, Asia director for the New York-based group Human Rights Watch, said in a recent statement.
Munir's wife, Suciwati, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name, maintains that the killing was the result of a conspiracy by military intelligence officials angered by her husband's activism.
She has said the key to Munir's case lies in a trove of telephone taps between a high-ranking Indonesian general and the pilot, which the intelligence service refuses to make public.
That theory was supported by Asmara Nababan, an Indonesian human rights activist and member of the fact-finding team established by the government last year to probe the case. The team concluded that Priyanto had had contact with an agent from Indonesia's intelligence agency, information that never surfaced in court.
No comments:
Post a Comment