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Australia’s government on Thursday denied asking Indonesia to avoid executing three convicted Australian drug smugglers this year out of concern it would harm Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s re-election fight.

As Australians Scott Rush, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran prepare final appeals against execution by firing squad, an Australian newspaper said senior diplomats met the Indonesian Attorney General’s Office for talks on the trio.

“We would never tie the circumstances of people facing potentially death row or of consular cases or of people in trouble, we would never tie that to the election cycle,” Acting Foreign Minister Simon Crean told Australian radio.

The three Australians are members of a group known as the Bali Nine, arrested in April 2005 in Bali with 8.3 kg of heroin strapped to their bodies, worth $3.5 million. Rush and ringleaders Chan and Sukumaran were sentenced to death in 2006.

Since their arrests, successive Australian governments have been trying to ensure the death penalty is not carried out, including Rudd, favored to win a second term in elections later this year despite slipping polls.

Rudd has promised to raise the sentences with Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono when court processes are concluded and if the death penalties still stand.

That could come as soon as next month with Yudhoyono to visit Australia from March 9 to 11 to discuss security, economic, development and environmental challenges, while also addressing Australia’s parliament.

Any approach for clemency would be a sensitive issue for both countries, with some Indonesian lawmakers and local media likely to see any approach by Rudd to Yudhoyono as interference.

Didiek Darmanto, a spokesman for Indonesia’s attorney general, told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper that while no direct request had been made to avoid 2010 executions, Jakarta embassy officials had indirectly raised the issue.

“They told us that it was a sensitive political issue ahead of the election,” Darmanto said, according to the paper.

Crean said Canberra was not resorting to closed-door “soft” diplomacy for the Bali Nine because it would be embarrassing for Rudd, a former diplomat, to have a confrontation with Indonesia in the build up to an election.

“We have to deal with all sorts of embarrassments through political cycles. But to make the suggestion that we’re saying ‘don’t do anything to these people till after the election is over’ is just plain wrong,” Crean said.

If final judicial reviews by the three are rejected, the only avenue remaining is a direct plea for clemency to Yudhoyono.

Reuters