Political Quotes

“I thank my friend from Maryland for his leadership on the Foreign Relations Committee and for his interest in this issue. I look forward to working with him to respond to the challenges President Duterte's policies pose to our relations with his government, as we seek to continue our strategic cooperation with the Philippines. Mr. President, on a separate but related matter, we are seeing another missed opportunity to reform the criminal justice system in Indonesia. President Joko Widodo took office in 2014 amid the hopes of many that he would improve on the country's history of human rights abuses. Instead, he reinstated the death penalty for drug trafficking, and the head of his government's antinarcotics agency recently expressed his approval of President Duterte's approach to combating illicit drugs. To the contrary, it is a serious mistake, and I urge President Joko to reverse course and focus on improving his police force and judicial system. Any government that uses capital punishment risks taking innocent life. But it is a particularly egregious practice in a country like Indonesia, where executions are peddled as effective justice despite a weak judicial system that is vulnerable to abuse, and to the detriment of its reform--nor is torturing and burying those suspected of involvement in the drug trade effective law enforcement.…”