Indonesia is totally unfit to hold the Presidency of the UN Human Rights Council.

How can Indonesia lead on human rights, when they are hiding from the world their sixty-year occupation of West Papua, with five hundred thousand men, women, and children dead? How can Indonesia lead on human rights, when their President is a war criminal who is complicit in genocide in East Timor and West Papua? Prabowo personally tortured East Timorese men, and presided over indiscriminate massacres of Indigenous people from Kraras to Mapenduma. He has never apologised or been held accountable for his crimes.

Indonesia did not win the Presidency due to their human rights record. The position rotates around the world, and Indonesia was the only candidate from the Asia Pacific region to put themselves forward. Nonetheless, this appointment makes a mockery of the UN and their claim to uphold international law and human rights. Over 105,000 West Papuans are currently displaced due to Indonesian military operations. Indonesia holding the Presidency of the HRC in 2026 is akin to Apartheid South Africa leading it in 1980.

Rather than leading the HRC, Indonesia should be a global pariah. For seven years, they have refused to admit the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, ignoring the repeated demand of over 110 countries, including all members of the EU commission, the United States, the Netherlands, and the UK. In that time, with West Papua closed to the world, they have launched countless military operations in Papua, killing thousands and displacing hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people.

Indonesia’s Minister for Human Rights, the West Papuan Natalius Pigai, has stated that Indonesia will use the position to counter breaches of international law in Venezuela and elsewhere. What about your own people, Mr Pigai? What about Indonesia’s own back yard? Every single day for the past sixty-three years, West Papuans have suffered breaches of international law. Every time Indonesia launches a new plantation or mine on occupied territory, the human rights of nearly 2 million Indigenous Papuans are violated. Every time a West Papuan is arrested and beaten for chanting for freedom, the Act of No Choice is repeated on a smaller scale. There is no democracy in West Papua. We have no rights as Indigenous people, as black people, as Christians.

Until the world intervenes to stop such egregious hypocrisy, until West Papua is recognised as a place of ongoing occupation, apartheid, and genocide, there will be no peace or justice in the Pacific. The ULMWP continues to demand that Indonesia opens West Papua to journalists and allows a UN visit to the territory.

Benny Wenda
President
ULMWP