ABSTRACT
In March 2002, prosecutors read out charges in the first trial to be conducted before Indonesia’s newly established Human Rights Court (HRC). The accused in the case, Abilio Soares, was the former Provincial Governor of Indonesian East Timor. The indictment accused Soares of commission of crimes against humanity during the period leading up to and after the independence referendum held in East Timor in September 1999. Over the next year and a half, a total of 18 Indonesian military and civilian authorities would be tried for crimes against humanity committed in East Timor. The East Timor prosecutions were followed by trials of military officials for an incident in 1984, in which the military fired into a group of protestors outside a mosque in the Tanjung Priok district of Jakarta, and the trial of police officers for an incident in 2000, in which police in Papua killed three people and arrested and assaulted scores more in retaliation for an attack on a police station.
