Indonesia agrees to repatriate ailing French national who has spent almost 20 years on death row

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JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Indonesia signed a deal on Friday to repatriate an ailing French national who has been on death row since 2007 for alleged drug offenses.

In 2015 Serge Atlaoui won a last-minute reprieve from being executed by a 13-member firing squad.

The transfer agreement was signed remotely by Indonesia’s senior minister of law Yusril Ihza Mahendra and France’s Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin, and was witnessed by delegations from both countries in Jakarta and Paris.

It came after Atlaoui, 61, made a last-ditch plea to be returned home last month.

The father of four, who is reportedly suffering from cancer, wrote to the Indonesian government requesting to serve the rest of his sentence in France. The deal will allow him to return home on Feb. 4, Mahendra said.

“The Indonesian government has decided not to execute the prisoner and has agreed to transfer him to France,” Mahendra told a joint news conference attended by France’s ambassador to Indonesia, Fabien Penone.

Penone thanked the Indonesian government for granting Atlaoui’s request.

“We want to develop our legal cooperation in a much more straightforward way,” Penone said, adding: “We are reinforcing our bilateral relationship, we have a real partnership.”

Atlaoui was arrested in 2005 for his alleged involvement in a factory manufacturing the psychedelic drug MDMA, sometimes called ecstasy, on the outskirts of Jakarta. His lawyers say he was employed as a welder at the factory and did not understand what the chemicals on the premises were used for.

Atlaoui, from Metz, has maintained his innocence during his 19 years’ incarceration, claiming that he was installing machinery in what he thought was an acrylics plant. Police accused him of being a “chemist” at the site. He was initially sentenced to life, but the Supreme Court in 2007 increased the sentence to death on appeal.

His case has drawn attention in France, which vigorously opposes the death penalty “in all places and under all circumstances.”

Mahendra said the French government had informed him that the maximum criminal penalty in France was 30 years imprisonment.

Once repatriated, “the authority to treat the convict is entirely under French government,” Mahendra said. If the France want to pardon Atlaoui or grant clemency, “that is entirely their authority and which we must also respect,” the minister added.

Indonesia executed eight death-row prisoners in May 2015, but Atlaoui was granted a stay of execution because he still had an outstanding court appeal. An Administrative Court in Jakarta denied that appeal the following month.

Indonesia’s government last month returned Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipina woman who had been on death row and who was nearly executed by firing squad in 2015, after longstanding requests from her home country.

Five Australian who spent almost 20 years in Indonesian prisons for heroin trafficking also returned to Australia in December under a deal struck between the governments.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says Indonesia is a major drug smuggling hub despite having some of the strictest drug laws in the world, in part because international drug syndicates target its young population.

About 530 people are on death row in Indonesia, mostly for drug-related crimes, including nearly 100 foreigners, the Ministry of Immigration and Corrections’ data showed last month. Indonesia’s last executions, of a citizen and three foreigners, were carried out in July 2016.