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been used to detain political prisoners. But whereas the continuation of the state of emergency and the preventive detention legislation is being increasingly questioned within India, the government introduced on 8 May 1975 a bill in Parliament increasing the period of detention without trial to two years, not sub- ject to review by an advisory board as provided for in article 22 of the constitution.
AI over the past year has taken further steps to ensure the early release of some Pakistani nationals who fled from East Bengal during the Bangladesh war. One of them, Iftikar Mahmood Randhawa, was released shortly after he was featured in AI's May 1974 Prisoners of the Month Campaign.
AI Secretary General Martin Ennals raised the issue of capital punishment for the first time with the Indian government when he made a special appeal on 22 November 1974 on behalf of Kista Gowd and Bhoomaiah, two peasants from Bihar and members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), who had been sentenced to death in January 1972 and are awaiting execution.
Indonesia
More than 55,000 political prisoners, all detained without charge or trial since 1965, are now in their 10th year in prison. Their position is increasingly desperate because despite the passage of many years, the government's policy towards them has remained essentially unchanged. In the past year the government has attemp- ted to define away the problem by insisting that there are no political prisoners in Indonesia and by re-naming political prisons as "rehabilitation centers". Official estimates continued to be given for the number of prisoners detained and these have varied between 20,000 and 35,000.
An Amnesty International delegation from Australia led by Richard McGarvie, Chairman of the Victoria Bar Council, and including Senator Peter Baume, Liberal Member of Parliament, Reverend Neil Gilmore, President of the Australian Council of Churches, and Mrs Leonore Ryan of AI's Victoria Section, arrived in Jakarta in January 1975. They were joined by the Head of Asian Research at the International Secretariat, Wen-hsien Huang. Regrettably Indonesian ministers and officials who were directly concerned with political imprisonment refused or were not able to meet the delegation to discuss the problem of imprisonment. The delegation therefore was unable to obtain from any ministry or department a statement of the government's view of the problem, nor was it possible to reconcile the government's claims regarding the total num- ber of people detained with the figures compiled by independent observers.
Whereas the Indonesian government statistics in the last years have varied around 30,000, several reliable observers put the total number of prisoners held at nearer 100,000. As more is known about the problem it has become evident that there are large numbers of political prisoners held outside recognized prison institutions. Throughout the many islands of the republic, in every town that serves as an administrative center, political prisoners are to be found, often in very small prisons that hold no more than between 10 to 20 detainees, or in military garrisons where the prisoners are used as unpaid labour in conditions that can be described as enforced serfdom.
There are an estimated 1,000 women political prisoners. The husbands of many of the married prisoners are themselves detained, and their children have
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