Negotiations on an accord that could see Schapelle Corby and Renae Lawrence serve out their sentences on Australian soil are still on track, Indonesia says.
Despite years of delay, Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa insists progress is being made on a prisoner transfer agreement between the 2 countries.
"It has not stalled," Dr Natalegawa told AAP in an exclusive interview.
"It is in a very long pipeline."
Australia first asked Indonesia to consider the agreement in 2005, the same year an Indonesian court sentenced Corby to 20 years' jail for smuggling 4.1kg of marijuana into Bali.
The governments originally believed an agreement would be signed by the end of 2006 but negotiations have proved more difficult than predicted.
While offering no timeline for the negotiations, Dr Natalegawa said Indonesia believed the agreement was an important issue.
"For lawyers, precedence is important, so you are looking for past practice," he said.
"And Indonesia has not had past practice of entering into transfer of prisoners arrangements.
"So it's just a matter of going through the process."
It is not clear what proportion of their sentences prisoners would need to serve before being eligible for transfer, but recent reports suggest it could be up to 3/4.
That would mean Corby, for example, would not be eligible for transfer for another 9 years.
Asked about the 3 Australians on death row in Indonesia - Bali 9 drug smugglers Scott Rush, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran - Dr Natalegawa said he understood people had different opinions about the morality and efficacy of the death penalty.
"But the fact of life is that the death penalty is at the moment part of Indonesia's body of law," he said.
"It was applied in the case of the 2002 terrorist perpetrators of the Bali bombing.
"In this instance now the same body of law is being applied to these 9 individuals."
Source: AAP, January 25, 2010
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