Rally for Referendum! We reject the Act of free choice!
Indonesian Embassy
(30 Great St Peter Street, London SW1 2BU)
Friday from 16:00-18:00
*** 50 years since the Act of free Choice ***
August 2nd, 2019, anniversary of the Act of free Choice.
https://www.ilwp.org/…/West_Papua_and_the_right_to_self-det…
Before the 1969 Act of free choice, on the question of universal adult suffrage the United Nations representative advised Indonesia that he: "could suggest no other method for this delicate political exercise than the democratic, orthodox and universally accepted method of “one man one vote.”
Indonesia argued this was not possible because: "In West Papua there exists, as is generally known, one of the most primitive and underdeveloped communities in the world."
Indonesia’s argument is untenable. International law does not permit a State to use primitiveness as a reason for preventing dependent peoples from deciding their future.
That principle was established as early as 1946 when South Africa attempted to integrate South West Africa (now Namibia). Integration was to take place on the basis of a tribal referendum in which the chief gave the decision of his tribe to a native commissioner appointed by the Government of South Africa. Individual Africans were not allowed to vote.
The General Assembly refused to accept that South West Africa could be incorporated into South Africa.
If the people were “too primitive” to take part in the self-determination exercise, they were also “too primitive” to understand the nature of the change being proposed. The General Assembly refused to approve the integration on the grounds that no valid decision could be made until the people of South West Africa were sufficiently advanced to understand the meaning of incorporating their territory into South Africa.
Resolution 1541(XV) was further evidence of a legal principle that dependent peoples should be protected against integration until they could make a valid choice on the basis of universal adult suffrage.
Indonesia’s argument that the Papuans were too primitive for universal adult suffrage does not make the act of free choice legitimate, but reinforces the fact that both the process and the result were invalid.
In reality there was no evidence in 1969, that the Papuan peoples were any less competent than other peoples to decide their future. Between 1959 and 1961 when the colony was still under Dutch administration, West Papuans voted directly for regional councils. In December 1968, the General Assembly, including Indonesia, reaffirmed the inalienable right of the peoples of Papua New Guinea to self-determination, and called upon Australia, the administering power, to: "hold free elections under United Nations supervision on the basis of universal adult suffrage in order to transfer effective power to the representatives of the people of the Territories.
If universal adult suffrage was possible for Papua New Guinea, how it could be legitimately denied to West Papuans who were essentially the same peoples living on the same island and separated only because of a border created by the colonial powers?
More info: www.freewestpapua.org
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