Hamish McDonald – A Sydney law professor will head an international study into whether there are grounds for a legal challenge to the incorporation of Western New Guinea into Indonesia in the 1960s.
Professor Sam Blay, a specialist in international law at the University of Technology, Sydney, has been engaged by the pro-independence Papuan Council Presidium in what is now the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, called West Papua by its separatist movement.
The Netherlands, as the former colonial power, as well as the United States and Australia as interested parties that exercised influence at the time, may be challenged in international courts to resume responsibility.
Under heavy pressure from the US, The Netherlands reluctantly handed over the territory to Indonesia in 1963 after a brief United Nations interregnum. In 1969 the UN accepted an "act of free choice", consisting of a vote by a panel of 1,000 representatives effectively chosen by Indonesian intelligence operatives.
Speaking in Sydney yesterday, the Presidium's international spokesman, Franzalbert Joku, said the Papuan body believed it had a strong case to overturn the legal base of Indonesian rule.
Self-determination was a legal right premised on freedom of choice and a state of self-government advanced enough to make a responsible choice, and should be exercised through democratic processes based on universal adult suffrage. Failure to meet these requirements, and the abuses and intimidation surrounding the 1969 process, rendered the act of free choice invalid, Mr Joku said.
Ghanaian-born Professor Blay, formerly dean of law at the University of Tasmania, is an expert in the law of self-determination with long experience in Australia, Germany and the US. He will engage a team of lawyers from The Netherlands, Indonesia and other countries.
He said the aim would be to use the law to get UN member nations to address the case. This could be, for example, by seeking a declaration from a Dutch court that Dutch conduct before decolonisation amounted to dereliction of duty, or to get the UN General Assembly to seek an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice in The Hague. "Without the law, the West Papuans have no basis to argue a case," he said.
The Papuans, meanwhile, bitterly condemned the revocation of visas by the Nauru Government to their delegates, preventing them appearing at next week's Pacific Islands Forum meeting on the tiny island nation. Several Papuan delegates attended last year's forum in Kiribati.
Mr Joku accused the Australian Government of lobbying against the Papuan presence at the forum. "We believe it is a case of a larger neighbour twisting the arm of a smaller country to conform to the wishes of the big power in the region." Indonesia will make its first appearance at the forum as a new "dialogue partner".