‘Time for compassion to prevail’: could the remaining Bali Nine members finally be coming home? | Bali Nine

In the dark of the early morning of April 29, 2015. two members of Australia’s so-called Bali Nine were tied to a stake in a lit field on the Indonesian prison island of Nusakambangan.

Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran ditched their blindfolds and sang as they stood in front of a 12-man gunned down.

They were killed at 12:35 p.m.

There were other names on the list this morning. Six other prisoners were also executed. But a woman who should have been killed that day was spared, granted a “miracle” at the last moment reprieve.

Last week, almost a decade since that morning, Mary Jane Veloso was granted an additional amnesty: she will be repatriated to her native Philippines.

“Mary Jane Veloso is coming home,” Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. announced. “[Her] the case was a long and difficult journey.’

Now the five members of Bali nine still in Indonesian prisons are also potentially on the verge of returning home.

The Bali Nine were nine young Australians arrested on the island in April 2005, caught in a botched attempt to smuggle 8kg of heroin into Australia, four of them with tightly wrapped packets of the drug clumsily taped to their bodies.

Scott Rush’s father, one of nine Australians, concerned that his son may have traveled to Bali to commit a crimecalled lawyer Bob Myers, who alerted the Australian Federal Police in the hope they would catch Rush before he left Australia.

Instead, the AFP alerted the Indonesian authorities, despite knowing it could expose the Australians to the death penalty.

Nineteen years later, five of the group remain in Indonesian prisons serving life sentences: Matthew Norman, Si-I Chen, Rush, Michael Chugai and Martin Stevens are in prisons in Bali and Java.

Chan and Sukumaran were executed; Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen died of cancer in 2018; and Renee Lawrence, the only woman in the group, was returned to Australia in 2018 after her sentence was commuted.

Last week it emerged that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and new Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto had reached an agreement in principle to repatriate the five remaining Australian prisoners, with reports suggesting this could happen as soon as next month.

“Our goal is to hopefully at the end of December the transfers of these prisoners will be completed,” Yusril Ihza Mahendra, Indonesia’s coordinating minister for law, human rights, immigration and corrections, told reporters on Thursday.

Yusril reiterated Jakarta’s preference for the Bali Nine to continue serving their prison sentences after returning home, but conceded a pardon would be a matter for Australia.

“We transfer them to their countries so they can serve their sentences there, but if the countries want to grant amnesty, we respect it. That is their right.”

But any repatriation would require conditions, Yusril indicated that the cost of transferring the prisoners would be borne by Australia; that Australia should recognize and respect the sentences handed down by the Indonesian judicial system; and that the prisoner transfer agreement would be reciprocal – that is, Australia would have to consider requests to repatriate Indonesian nationals held in Australian prisons.

Yusril said he would discuss the proposed repatriation with Australian Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke when Burke visits Jakarta next week. However, he stressed that the talks should not be “framed … as a huge victory for Australia”, but rather a decision driven by Indonesia’s desire for stable diplomatic relations and humanitarian concern.

There are no repatriations fait accompli: the deal is not without its critics in Indonesia, and diplomatic missteps or overconfidence could jeopardize it.

Comment from ministers in Australia – aware of the fragility of the agreement – was deliberately vague, focusing on the “offer” and “delicate” negotiations rather than returns. Sources say the bureaucratic machinations of exactly how to swap the prisoners – both ways – could also take longer than estimated at the end of the year.

Timothy Harris, the Catholic Bishop of Townsville, has been a staunch supporter of the Rush and Chugay families in the many years since their sons’ arrests. He visited them both in Kerobokan prison in Bali.

He said news of a potential repatriation was “fantastic news … but I’m very cautious.”

He said he was grateful to Prabowo and Albanese for their willingness to consider a prisoner swap: “I think these two men should be congratulated and given credit where it’s due.”

Harris said he spoke with Scott Rush’s father, Lee.

“Scott’s parents are reasonable people,” Harris said. “They’ve been through hell and I think they’re quietly hoping they’ll get their son home.

“After 20 years, how much more can a person take? There comes a time when it is better to bring them back home.

Indonesia’s Law Minister Supratman Andi Agtas said any deal would involve the repatriation of some Indonesian citizens imprisoned in Australia and that his department was working to establish the necessary legal mechanisms. Indonesia and Australia do not currently have a prisoner exchange agreement.

Much of the work will be done away from the glare of media scrutiny. Behind the scenes, Australian ambassador Penny Williams met with Indonesia’s law minister in Jakarta to discuss the proposal, which Albanese and Prabowo later agreed to on the sidelines of the APEC meeting in Peru. The hard work will be done by officials, but they need a political imprimatur to seal the deal.

Andreas Harsono, Indonesia researcher for Human Rights Watch, says the repatriation of foreign prisoners — and the reciprocal return of Indonesian citizens — carries with it a sense of personal mission for Indonesia’s new president, born of a specific case nearly a decade ago.

In 2015, the same year the Indonesian government executed Chan and Sukumaran, it won the freedom of Indonesian domestic helper Wilfrida Soik, sentenced to death for murder in Malaysia.

Soik, according to Indonesia, was a victim of trafficking and was regularly tortured by her employer, whom she stabbed to death. Indonesia waged a concerted campaign for five years to repatriate her.

Prabowo, then a credible presidential candidate, was key to Indonesia’s diplomatic efforts. He visited Soik in prison, publicly pleaded her case and privately campaigned for her release.

Almost a decade later, the issue of Indonesian citizens facing punishment, particularly execution, remains close to his heart for reasons as personal as political.

“He went to Malaysia [for Soik]he negotiated and managed to win her freedom, bringing her back to Indonesia. I really believe it’s personal for him,” Harsono says. “There are hundreds of Indonesians on death row in foreign prisons, mostly in Middle Eastern countries.

“This is happening because President Prabowo has a personal interest in saving overseas Indonesians from death sentences.

“And to do that, he must do the same with foreigners in prison in Indonesia facing life or death sentences.” Australians are not the only ones he agrees to be released.

It emerged on Friday that France had formally requested the repatriation of a death row inmate, Serge Atlawi, who was convicted of drug offenses and was also scheduled for execution but was eventually spared by it in 2015.

Prabowo is not a fighter for human rights and seems an unlikely candidate for the emancipator of the condemned.

The former son-in-law of military dictator Suharto, Prabowo was the commanding general of the notorious Kopassus special forces branch. He was discharged from the army in 1998. amid allegations of human rights abuses, including the disappearance of 13 pro-democracy activists during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. He has always denied wrongdoing.

For years he was blacklisted from visiting the US or Australia.

But in his last election campaign, he tried to soften the image of the brutal Hardman into that of a brute pater familias: a more charismatic statesman than the ardent, pious nationalist he had previously portrayed himself as.

Ricky Gunawan, an Indonesian human rights lawyer whose work focuses on the abolition of the death penalty, says Prabowo has never explicitly stated publicly that he opposes the death penalty, but “we’ve known for quite some time on a personal level that he opposes the death penalty.”

“When he tried to save Wilfrid a few years ago, it showed his commitment… Although he is an ex-military general with a bad human rights record, he is a smart guy. He reads books, he understands geopolitics, he knows what doesn’t look good for his administration internationally.”

Former President Joko Widodo, once a city mayor and governor of Java with little appetite for the machinations of international politics, supported the death penalty. “Jokowi” signed off on the executions of Chan and Sukumaran in his first few weeks in office.

Harsono says Jokowi believed that his predecessor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – who imposed an unofficial moratorium on executions between 2008 and 2013 – he lacks the “nerves” to sign a sufficient number of execution orders, leaving him with a backlog.

Although the death penalty retains broad public support in Indonesia, there is a shift, Harsono says, toward abolition in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, especially among the country’s globally minded political elite.

From a legal point of view, the change is also evident: Indonesia has not carried out an execution since 2016, while a major change to the country’s penal code, effective from January 2026, allows for the conditional commutation of death sentences.

As of October 2023 509 prisoners were sentenced to death, 89 of them foreign nationals.

In the final weeks of Chan and Sukumaran’s lives, Amnesty International was among the loudest campaigners for clemency.

Three of the remaining Bali Nine inmates – Chen, Rush and Norman – at some stage in their prison terms, whose sentences bounce between appeals, also found themselves on death row, formally facing execution.

“These individuals have served 19 years in prison: any justice system must focus on rehabilitation, ensuring that each person has the chance to rebuild their lives,” Amnesty International Australia’s Kyinzom Dhongdue told the Guardian.

“Maybe now is the time for compassion to prevail.”