Sovereign Immunity

Australian beauty therapist Schapelle Corby was heading off for a holiday in Bali, flying from Perth Brisbane to Bali via Sydney, only to be busted on arrival for marijuanna smuggling. No one smuggles pot INTO Indonesia, and everyone outside the Indonesian legal system is convinced that a baggage handler smuggling ring in Australia, which reportedly uses domestic luggage (in this case from Perth to Sydney) to transport narcotics domestically, missed a pickup. So Ms. Corby’s pot-stuffed bags arrive in Indonesia and she’s picked up by the police. She was just convicted and faces 20 years in prison. She is 27 years old.

On the one hand, it’s important that politicians not tinker with the judiciary. Can we justify an exception in this case? There are drastic ramifications for Indonesia, both in foreign relations and their economy, not to mention Corby’s likely innocence. Nobody wins with her conviction. Indonesia’s legal system looks shoddy in the western press. Corby gets 20 years. The real culprits remain at large. And tourism, a major source of income for Indonesia and Bali in particular, is “>bound to plummet even further. The Bangkok Post warns that boycotts of Indonesia as a tourism destination could be devastating coming on top of an already existing decline in visitor numbers brought on by terrorism and the recent tsunami disaster.

AUSTRALIAN TOURISTS IN INDONESIA
1999: 531,211
2002: 346,245
2003: 268,538

No figures are available for 2004, but it’s expected to be lower. And no one doubts that the figures for 2005 will be even lower. More than 90% of Australians believe that Corby is innocent. Australian PM Howard called the verdict “impossibly stupid.”

Everyone and no one is to blame. Australia should have busted the smuggling ring long ago. The baggage handler smugglers shouldn’t have blown it. And the Indonesian police shouldn’t be targetting Corby:

Despite a wave of controversy and anger in Australia, Bali drug squad chief Colonel Bambang Sugiarto said he and his officers simply went about their “ordinary duties” when they compiled the evidence that resulted in Corby’s conviction and 20 year prison sentence.

Nor was there any sympathy from the judge:

The Indonesian judge who jailed Schapelle Corby for 20 years has likened her defence to “a crying competition”, and says he slept easily after the decision. Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper reports Chief Judge Linton Sirait as saying that his only reaction to the Australian public’s anger at the verdict is to point out that the case was decided solely according to the law. “I am responsible to God for my verdict, not to the people,” he said.

Perhaps—but is he responsible to his country’s interests? It seems that the best case scenario here would be for Indonesia’s president to grant some sort of executive pardon.

There’s no information on the reaction in Indonesia—the English language Jakarta Post is just reporting the Australian reaction. I wonder how it’s being seen in the archipelago: a women who deserved her punishment or an unforunate incident that will hurt bilateral relations…