Skip to main content

14 Indonesians on death row seek clemency


The Indonesian government has stepped up efforts to save the lives of 14 of its citizens who are on death row in Saudi Arabia for being convicted of involvement in a range of criminal cases, including murder."Our missions in Riyadh and Jeddah will provide legal assistance to these people and help them get a royal pardon or their sentences commuted," said an Indonesian diplomat while reacting to a recent report on the cases. He refused to divulge more details about the cases. The report said the Indonesian government had managed to persuade the Saudi side to delay executions, citing appeals for clemency to some of the victims' families.


"We are intensifying our personal approach to family members of the victims," said the diplomat. The Indonesian side has already requested the Saudi government to grant royal clemency in some individual cases, but the host government has not responded so far, said another report obtained by Arab News yesterday.The report added that the Kingdom deported 24,020 Indonesians without valid work permits in 2008. Most of them were employed as housemaids.Between January and September last year, around 18,000 Indonesians working illegally in the Kingdom were deported. These workers lacked the necessary legal documents and had violated the terms of their visas, according to the Indonesian Embassy.Most of them entered the Kingdom using Umrah visas but stayed to work, while others had work visas that had expired. The report said more than 20,000 Indonesian workers are deported from Saudi Arabia each year.Some of 14 workers who are seeking pardon from the Saudi government were found guilty many years ago.


Siti Zainab was sentenced to death several years ago for killing her employer. The Indonesian Embassy has repeatedly approached her victim's family to secure a pardon for her. "The Indonesian president has written to the Saudi government twice about her case," said the report.The report claimed that some of these workers committed murders while acting in self-defense.Others have been handed death sentences for killing compatriots. Last year, the Indonesian Embassy succeeded in postponing the execution of six workers.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

child sex workers in Bandung

A policeman, right, watches over two masseuses and their customers during a raid on suspected prostitution activities at a hotel in Changchun, in northeast China's Jilin province The Bandung authority is at loss to uncover cases of covert prostitution involving junior and senior high school students, whose number continues to rise in the West Java capital. Eli, a sex worker advocacy program mentor from the Rumah Cemara Group in Bandung, said it was hard to provide advocacy to teenagers involved in covert prostitution since most were not receptive. The number of those involved in covert prostitution is believed to be higher compared to commercial sex on the streets, she added. Eli has been providing support to more than 200 housewives and child sex workers over the past two years, around 20 of who are senior high school students between the ages of 15 and 16. "They are psychologically unstable at those ages. They are hard to handle due to their strong motivation to ea
Post a Comment
Read more

Bricklaying in Aceh

Refleksi: http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaileditorial.asp?fileid= 20070405. F07&irec= 6 Bricklaying in Aceh I was looking back the other day at a letter in the British newspaper The Times as written by Professor H. H. Turner in January 1925, who was challenging the government's statement that a good British bricklayer would lay 500 bricks per day which made him the best in the world.The professor claimed to have found one bricklayer who dealt with 2000 bricks in eight hours and another one who laid 890 bricks in just one hour -- one presumes the brickie ran out of steam after a while. It made me wonder just how many bricks were being laid in Aceh province, bearing in mind the climatic differences between gloomy old England and sun-drenched Indonesia. The heat factor alone could well in fact reduce the work rate by up to fifty percent, and then of course there are the incentive factors of salary and working conditions. An English bricklayer in 1925 would have earned about one
Post a Comment
Read more

Debate Islam in Indonesia

http://www.thejakar taglobe.com/ opinion/interloc utors-of- indonesian- islam/560447 Interlocutors of Indonesian Islam Ahmad Najib Burhani | December 08, 2012 A few months ago, the Japanese anthropologist Mitsuo Nakamura told me that studying Nahdlatul Ulama as an organization was beyond the imagination of any American scholar from the 1950s to the ’70s. But he is not the only academic to have noticed this. George McT. Kahin of Cornell University stated the same thing. Even NU-expert Martin van Bruinessen was not expecting to study NU as his primary focus when he came to Indonesia for the first time in the 1980s.   During the early decades of Indonesian independence, NU was relatively unorganized and its management was largely based on the authority of religious teachers ( kyai ). Of course there were a number of scholars who studied NU-affiliated religious schools ( pesantren ) and its kyai, but not NU as an organization.   Even though NU was one of the winners o
Post a Comment
Read more