Local law should apply to foreigners
- By Mitchell Blatt
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail China.org.cn, May 15, 2015
Each country has a right to its sovereignty. Although Australia has ended capital punishment, there is no international consensus that capital punishment is wrong. Sometimes executing criminals is the best way to keep them from reoffending. The fact that Indonesia has harsher laws on the books is a local issue, and Indonesia should apply its laws to foreigners and to its own citizens equally.
Indonesia's drug policy seems to be working. In 2004, the World Health Organization found that Indonesia's rate of intravenous illegal drug use was just 260 per 100,000 people. That compares to a rate of 1,905 per 100,000 in Australia in 2007.
Drug smugglers should certainly pay for their crimes regardless of whether the sentence is a long prison term or death. The criminals were not unaware that what they were doing was wrong when they committed their crimes. Smuggling heroin is illegal everywhere in the world, and travelers to Indonesia are warned of the punishment for smuggling on airplanes and when going through customs inspection.
If Chan and Sukumaran had been caught breaking the law in Australia, they would have been imprisoned as well. Twenty percent of Australia's imprisoned population is foreign-born, one of the highest proportions in any large country, according to the International Centre for Prison Studies. Only 0.5 percent of Indonesia's prison population is foreign-born. Australia also detains hundreds of asylum seekers from Southeast Asia in camps, a practice that the UN and Amnesty International claim is inconsistent with international human rights law.
As a foreigner living in Asia myself, it is hard to feel much sympathy for these criminals, whose actions give foreigners abroad a bad reputation. They are the very people that CCTV's Yang Rui was talking about when he said, "The Ministry of Public Security must clean out foreign garbage."
If Indonesia wants to wipe drug smugglers from the face of the earth, that's their business. Now some Australians are pledging to boycott Bali. Let the drug dealers be the first to join the boycott.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/MitchellBlatt.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)