Another fortnight for Bali pair

THE legal ordeal of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran has been further prolonged.

Condemned Australians Myuran Sukumaran, right, and Andrew Chan several years ago.

THE legal ordeal of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, clinging to faint hope their lives can be saved in a courtroom, has been further prolonged.

The Australian heroin smugglers who have been on Indonesia’s death row for more than eight years must wait at least another fortnight to know their fate, after the Jakarta Administrative Court adjourned their cases again yesterday.

But the timing of their executions remains unsettled, with Vice-President Jusuf Kalla acknowledging that appeals from the eight other drug convicts marked to die at the same time could take months to finalise.

Chan and Sukumaran’s appeal to the Administrative Court was adjourned after a lawyer representing President Joko Widodo asked for the Australians’ applications to be dismissed and costs to be awarded against them.

“We demand the Administrative Court reject the defendants’ challenge because the subject of the lawsuit is not under the State Administrative Law,” Bernadetta Maria Erna told the three judges.

“Clemency is the authority of the head of state.”

Chan, 31, and Sukumaran, 33, are appealing against the earlier decision by the court’s chairman not to hear their case against Mr Joko’s denial of presidential clemency.

Their lawyers argue that the President, who has vowed “no mercy” for all 58 remaining death-row drug convicts, failed in his duty to consider the clemency applications properly and individually.

Two more hearings are scheduled then a summary on April 1. A decision is expected to follow several days later.

Outside the court a lawyer for the men, Leonard Arfan, said they were not challenging the President’s authority to decide clemency but the way he had exercised it.

Chan and Sukumaran, sentenced to death in February 2006 for their roles in the so-called Bali Nine heroin smuggling plot, remained yesterday at Besi jail, on Nusakambangan penal island.

Two other condemned convicts’ cases and sentences are also before the Supreme Court.