Rights lawyer: ‘I do not want to steal attention from plight of Papuans’
HUMAN rights lawyer Veronica Koman has finally broken her silence on accusations surrounding her alleged involvement in a series of protests in Indonesia’s Papua region staged in response to alleged racial abuse against Papuan students in Surabaya, East Java.
In a written statement uploaded to the lawyer’s social media, Koman, who currently lives overseas, said she had chosen not to respond to the allegations against her so as not to distract from the main problems facing Papuans.
“I, Veronica Koman, with full awareness, have always chosen not to respond to what the police have alleged through the mass media.
“I did not mean this because everything I was accused of was true, but because I did not want to participate in efforts to divert the issue from the main problems that were actually happening in Papua,” Koman said in a Facebook post.
She also said the criminalisation against her was just one of many examples of the large-scale intimidation Papuans currently faced.
“I reject all attempts at character assassination that are being directed at me, the official lawyer for the Papuan Student Alliance [AMP].
“The police have abused their authority and have overestimated their efforts to criminalise me, both in their methods and in exaggerating the facts,” she added.
The East Java Police have named Koman among the suspects of causing unrest in Papua for allegedly provoking people to riot via her
social media updates.
She was charged under several articles of the Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law, Law No. 1/1946 on misinformation, Article 160 of the Criminal Code, as well as Law 40/2008 on the eradication of racial and ethnic discrimination.
The police also investigated Koman’s bank account, suspecting that she had conducted dubious transactions.
“My account balance is within reasonable limits as a lawyer who also often does research. It, of course, was acceptable for me to withdraw money in Papua when I visited Papua, at a reasonable amount for my daily living expenses,” she said in response to the accusation.
She went on to say that the examination of her personal account was irrelevant to the charges against her.
“This is a form of abuse of police authority, especially then conveying it to the media with an extremely excessive narrative,” she said.
Sophie de Graaf, the executive director of Lawyer 4 Lawyer, a Netherlands-based non-political and independent foundation for legal workers, has written a letter to President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo to express the organisation’s concern about the charges against Koman.
“We have reason to believe that the criminal charges filed against Veronica Koman are connected to her legitimate activities as a lawyer.
“Moreover, these charges interfere with the fundamental right to legal counsel for people whose human rights may have been violated by Indonesian security personnel,” de Graaf said in a written statement received by The Jakarta Post on Saturday.
She said any obstruction of Koman’s professional activities as the legal representative of Papuan people was a violation of their right to a fair trial.