[The former governor of East Timor, Abilio Soares, has become the first Indonesian official to be sentenced to jail for gross human rights violations in East Timor in 1999. A special human rights court presided by Judge Emi Marni Mustafa sentenced Soares to three years' in jail, well short of the 10-and-a-half years sought by prosecutors. Judge Emi found Soares guilty of failing to prevent and stop violence involving his subordinates – resulting in more than 100 deaths.]

Presenter/Interviewer: Sen Lam

Speakers: Sidney Jones, from the International Crisis Group in Jakarta

Lam: Sidney Jones is the verdict a satisfactory one?

Jones: "In fact these trials have been so twisted that in a sense the guilty verdict is as much a travesty of justice as an acquittal would have been. It's not the verdicts that we should be looking at, it's the whole process from the first indictments, and in fact the prosecution failed to present a single witness that didn't help the defence."

Lam: So you agree with critics then who say that the trials were meant to avert an international tribunal?

Jones: "Well it's not clear whether they were meant to avert an international tribunal because it's not clear that an international tribunal was in the cards, but what is clear if that no information came out of this particular trial or of any of the others that are currently ongoing about the Indonesian government's role in the violence that took place in East Timor in 1999."

Lam: So what now for Abilio Soares, is he likely to appeal?

Jones: "He certainly is likely to appeal, we don't know that for a fact yet, but I think one of the interesting things is going to be to see how the international community reacts because it would be a real mistake to equate convictions with accountability. The whole issue of holding the military accountable for what it did in East Timor in 1999 is not going to be served by a few guilty verdicts."

Lam: Indeed there have also been calls for higher ranking military generals to be brought to trial, is there a sense then that people at the local level are being sacrificed while maintaining the impunity if you like of the higher ranking generals in Jakarta?

Jones: "Well we'll have to see what happens with two of the ongoing trials – General Adam Dimiri, who is the most senior officer on trial and who bizzarrely appeared as a witness for the prosecution in the trial of the governor today is someone who is likely to be very strongly supported by his fellow officers when he does come to trial. I think if they can't produce any evidence against Dimiri and it's unlikely that there will be any evidence produced, the chances of going any higher are virtually nil."

Lam: All the same though do you think the sentencing today and verdict today passed on Abilio Soares that it is a good start in the right direction?

Jones: "I don't see how you can say it's a good start in the right direction if the whole process was so deeply flawed from the very beginning. If the fact that military officers were brought to an ad hoc human rights tribunal was a first step toward accountability then I would say maybe it was useful, but in fact even the mandate of the court was so flawed you couldn't get at the notion that the state was involved in widespread and systematic violence. Absent that it's hard to see how these trials did anything except trivialise the whole concept of crimes against humanity."

Lam: And yet there are still other defendants awaiting trial, another 17 more I understand?

Jones: "That's right but we're going to face the same basic design flaw in all of those trials and again the mistake will be to see the verdicts as indicative of much of anything when it's been the whole way in which the charges have been drawn up and pursued that's at the heart of why these are so unsatisfactory."