As two Australians on death row in Indonesia await their fate, Charles Sturt University (CSU) ethicist, Professor John Kleinig reflects on the political and ethical complexities surrounding the case.

A member of CSU's Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), Professor Kleinig is a world authority on criminal justice ethics:

The current anxieties over the imminent execution of Mr Myuran Sukumaran and Mr Andrew Chan, leaders of the so-called Bali Nine heroin trafficking group, reflect political and ethical complexities of great subtlety. These are not issues to be dealt with ham-fistedly but with nuance and respect.

There is of course the matter of national sovereignty, a matter made more problematic by Indonesia's proximity and importance to Australia.

It is important that Australian diplomacy gives full weight to the potentially wider ramifications that disrespectful 'pressure' might have so that, whatever else happens, neither country comes away from whatever negotiations are taking place feeling that it has lost face.

The issue of capital punishment for the two Australians is also politically and ethically complicated. Whatever one believes about the legitimacy of capital punishment, there are further questions in a case such as this.

Although some oppose capital punishment as a matter of principle, others are opposed largely because of the possibility of mistake, the latter a questionable concern in the present case. Even for those who accept capital punishment in principle there is the question, 'Is drug trafficking an offence for which it should be available?'

There are additional questions about the means employed and even whether Sukumaran and Chan are 'guilty enough', since they were only deputies in a larger enterprise. The leaders, presumably bearing greater responsibility, were arrested in Australia and are currently looking forward to fairly imminent release from the Australian prison in which they have been serving their sentences.

A delicate diplomatic issue is raised by the fact that Australia does not punish drug trafficking as heavily as Indonesia. It is one thing for Indonesia to impose substantially heavier penalties on its own; it is another to impose such penalties on the citizens of a country that has eschewed the death penalty.

The United States, currently the western power that most frequently imposes the death penalty, has confronted the same issue and has controversially chosen to respond in a way that would permit the Indonesians to go ahead with execution.

A further complication is constituted by the fact that the Australian Federal Police were instrumental in alerting the Indonesians to the trafficking arrangements, enabling the Indonesians to arrest the Bali Nine in Indonesia rather than leaving it to the Australian authorities to arrest them on their return.

Execution might lead to a change in international police cooperation, quite apart from the responsibility that Australian police authorities may have for an outcome they wouldn't have contemplated on their own soil.

It is of course, possible to argue that the members of the Bali Nine were hardly innocents abroad or unaware that what they were doing was illegal and subject to the most serious penalties. Like most people who break the law, they figured that the risk was worth it. So they might simply be said to have taken a gamble and lost.

That presumes that the activity in which they were involved warranted the penalty that the Indonesian courts have mandated. However, though smoking may cause lung cancer it does not relieve us of responsibility to help those who contract it.

Does the subsequent remorse of the ring leaders change the situation?

There is also a question about the genuineness or lastingness of moral change precipitated by events such as these. But even if the change in the two men is genuine, there is no straightforward argument that they should no longer be executed. Perhaps one could argue that the extinction of human life should never take place unless there would be no point in not ending it, here belied by the fact that the people in question might now be expected to lead productive social lives. As easy as it might be to say this in individual cases, there are problems about embedding this possibility in social policy. That's not the end of the argument but it points to some of its further complexities.

 For good or ill, the current case will be resolved at the diplomatic level. Though we may also hope that the end result is ethically acceptable, politics is governed by compromises that are often ethically questionable.