In the dark of the early morning of 29 April 2015, two members of Australia’s so-called Bali Nine were each tied to a stake in a floodlit field on the Indonesian prison island of Nusakambangan.
Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran refused blindfolds, and sang as they stood before a firing squad of 12.
There were other names on the list that morning. Six further prisoners were also executed. But one woman scheduled to be killed that day was spared, granted a “miracle” last-minute reprieve.
Last week, nearly a decade since that morning, Mary Jane Veloso was granted a further amnesty: she will be repatriated to her native Philippines.
“Mary Jane Veloso is coming home,” the Philippine president, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, announced. “[Her] case has been a long and difficult journey.”
Now, the five members of the Bali Nine still in Indonesian prisons are also potentially on the verge of coming home.
The Bali Nine were nine young Australians arrested on the island in April 2005, caught in a crude attempt to smuggle 8kg of heroin to Australia, four of them with tightly wrapped packages of drugs clumsily taped to their bodies.
The father of Scott Rush, one of the nine Australians, concerned his son might have been travelling to Bali to commit a criminal offence, had rung a lawyer, Bob Myers, who had tipped off the Australian federal police in the hope they would intercept Rush before he left Australia.
Instead, the AFP alerted Indonesian authorities, despite knowing it could expose the Australians to the death penalty.
Nineteen years on, five of the group remain in Indonesian prisons, serving life sentences: Matthew Norman, Si-Yi Chen, Rush, Michael Czugaj and Martin Stephens are in jails across Bali and Java.
Chan and Sukumaran were executed; Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen died of cancer in 2018; and Renae Lawrence, the only woman in the group, was repatriated to Australia in 2018 after having her sentence commuted.
Last week it emerged the Australian prime minister, Anthony Albanese, and the new Indonesian president, Prabowo Subianto, had reached an in-principle agreement to repatriate the five remaining Australian prisoners, with reports suggesting it could happen as soon as next month.
“Our target is hopefully, at the end of December, the transfers of these prisoners will have been complete,” Indonesia’s coordinating minister for law, human rights, immigration and corrections, Yusril Ihza Mahendra, told reporters on Thursday.
Yusril reiterated Jakarta’s preference for the Bali Nine to continue serving their jail sentences after returning home, but conceded that clemency would be a matter for Australia.
“We are transferring them to their countries so they can serve their sentence there, but if the countries want to give amnesty, we respect it. It’s their right.”
But any repatriations would carry conditions, Yusril stipulated, including: that the cost of transferring the prisoners would be borne by Australia; that Australia should acknowledge and respect the sentences handed down by Indonesia’s justice system; and that a prisoner transfer arrangement would be reciprocal – that is, Australia would need to consider repatriation requests for Indonesian nationals held in Australian jails.
Yusril said he would discuss the proposed repatriations with Australia’s home affairs minister, Tony Burke, when Burke visited Jakarta next week. However, he stressed the negotiations should not be “framed … as a huge victory for Australia”, but rather a decision driven by Indonesia’s desire for sound diplomatic relations and humanitarian concern.
The repatriations are no fait accompli: the deal is not without critics domestically in Indonesia, and diplomatic missteps, or overconfidence, could jeopardise it.
Ministerial commentary in Australia – conscious of the agreement’s fragility – has been deliberately indefinite, focused on “the proposal” and “delicate” negotiations, rather than returns. Sources say the bureaucratic machinations of exactly how prisoners are to be exchanged – in both directions – might also take longer than the end-of-year forecast.
Timothy Harris, the Catholic bishop of Townsville, has been a steadfast supporter of the Rush and Czugaj families in the long years since their sons’ arrests. He has visited both men in Bali’s Kerobokan prison.
He said news of a potential repatriation was “fantastic news … but I am being very cautious”.
He said he was grateful to Prabowo and Albanese for their willingness to consider a prisoner exchange: “I think those two men need to be congratulated and credit given where it is due.”
Harris said he had spoken with Scott Rush’s father, Lee.
“Scott’s parents are salt-of-the-earth people,” Harris said. “They have been through hell and I think they are quietly hopeful they will get their son home.
“After 20 years, how much more can a person take? There comes a time where it is better to bring them home.”
Indonesia’s law minister, Supratman Andi Agtas, said any deal would involve some Indonesian nationals imprisoned in Australia being repatriated, and that his department was working to establish the legal mechanisms required. Indonesia and Australia do not currently have a prisoner swap arrangement.
Much of the work will happen away from the glare of media scrutiny. Behind the scenes, Australia’s ambassador, Penny Williams, met Indonesia’s law minister in Jakarta to discuss the proposal that Albanese and Prabowo later agreed to on the sidelines of the Apec meeting in Peru. The heavy lifting will be done by officials, but they need the political imprimatur to seal the deal.
Andreas Harsono, an Indonesia researcher for Human Rights Watch, says the repatriation of foreign prisoners – and the reciprocal return of Indonesian nationals – carries with it a sense of personal mission for the new Indonesian president, born of a particular case nearly a decade ago.
In 2015, the same year the Indonesian government executed Chan and Sukumaran, it won the freedom of an Indonesian domestic worker, Wilfrida Soik, sentenced to death for murder in Malaysia.
Soik, according to Indonesia, had been trafficked and was routinely tortured by her employer, whom she stabbed to death. Indonesia ran a concerted campaign over five years to have her repatriated.
Prabowo, then a hopeful presidential candidate, was key to Indonesia’s diplomatic effort. He visited Soik in prison, publicly championed her case, and privately agitated for her release.
Nearly a decade on, the issue of Indonesian citizens facing punishment, in particular execution, remains close to his heart, for reasons as much personal as political.
“He went to Malaysia [for Soik], he negotiated and he was successful in winning her freedom, bringing her back to Indonesia. I truly believe that, for him, this is personal,” Harsono says. “There are hundreds of Indonesians on death row in foreign prisons, mostly in countries in the Middle East.
“This is happening because President Prabowo personally has an interest in saving Indonesians overseas from death sentences.
“And to do that, he needs to do the same with foreigners in jail in Indonesia, facing life sentences or death sentences. The Australians are not the only ones he is agreeing should be freed.”
On Friday, it emerged France had formally requested the repatriation of a death row prisoner, Serge Atlaoui, convicted of drug offences, and who was also scheduled for, but ultimately spared of, execution in 2015.
Prabowo is no human rights crusader and appears an unlikely candidate as emancipator of the convicted.
The ex-son-in-law of military dictator Suharto, Prabowo was a commandant general of the notorious Kopassus special forces branch. He was dismissed from the military 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 most recent election campaign he sought to soften the image of brutal hardman into one of avuncular pater familias: more charismatic statesman than the fiery, pious nationalist he had previously presented as.
Ricky Gunawan, an Indonesian human rights lawyer whose work focuses on ending the death penalty, says Prabowo has never explicitly said publicly he opposes capital punishment, but “we have known for quite some time at a personal level that he opposes the death penalty”.
“When he was trying to save Wilfrida a few years ago, that showed his commitment … Although he is a former military general with a poor human rights record, he’s a smart guy. He reads books, he understands geopolitics, he knows what doesn’t look good for his administration internationally.”
The former president Joko Widodo, once a city mayor and Javanese governor 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 felt his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – who imposed an unofficial moratorium on executions between 2008 and 2013 – lacked the “nerve” to sign a sufficient number of execution warrants, leaving him a backlog of cases.
While capital punishment retains widespread popular support across Indonesia, there is a shift, Harsono says, towards abolition in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation, particularly among the country’s globally minded political elite.
Legally, the shift is apparent too: Indonesia has not carried out an execution since 2016, while an overhaul of the country’s criminal code, in effect from January 2026, allows for death sentences to be conditionally commuted.
As of October 2023, 509 prisoners were on death row, 89 of them foreign nationals.
In the final weeks of the lives of Chan and Sukumaran, Amnesty International was among the most vociferous campaigners for clemency.
Three of the remaining Bali Nine prisoners – Chen, Rush and Norman – have, at some stage of their prison terms, their sentences bouncing 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 every person has the chance to rebuild their lives,” Amnesty International Australia’s Kyinzom Dhongdue tells the Guardian.
“Perhaps now is the time for compassion to prevail.”
