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Officials from the Australian Embassy visited the Attorney General’s Office on Tuesday to request information about Australian citizens who were facing the death sentence here and to warn about the sensitivity of the pending executions at a time when Australia was preparing for elections.

“They asked for data about their citizens who are facing the death sentence,” said AGO spokesman Didiek Darmanto. The request was not meant to intervene in Indonesia’s justice system but because execution was a very sensitive issue in Australia, Didiek said after a meeting with Paul Griffiths and Emily Street, the embassy’s staffers for political affairs.

An AGO statement issued after the meeting said the two countries had different views on the death sentence. While Australia abolished it in 1961, Indonesia still holds to “the necessity of capital punishment.”

“Capital punishment applies to such crimes as drug trafficking, corruption and terrorism,” the AGO statement said. “The execution can be carried out after the inmate has exhausted all legal options and after all extraordinary measures, namely requests for judicial review and presidential clemency, have been turned down.”

The Australian Embassy is slated to hold talks on the death sentence on Wednesday with officials from the AGO and the Coordinating Ministry for Political, Legal and Security Affairs.

In February 2006, the Denpasar District Court in Bali sentenced to death Australian citizens Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, the convicted leaders of a drug ring known as the Bali Nine, for attempting to smuggle heroin out of Bali.

In September 2006, the Supreme Court, based on an appeal by prosecutors, sentenced four more Bali Nine members — Scott Rush, Tan Duc Than Nguyen, Si Yi Chen and Matthew Norman — to death.

But in March 2008 three members of the group had their sentences commuted to life in prison after their judicial reviews were accepted. The death sentences of Norman, Chen and Nguyen were reduced to life imprisonment, but Sukumaran, Chan and Rush remain on death row.

The AGO said earlier there were 107 inmates on death row in Indonesia but that their executions were hampered by the absence of a specific law limiting the period in which inmates can file for judicial reviews or request a presidential pardon.

Earlier this month, Attorney General Hendarman Supandji called for a law on the judicial review period. Hendarman said inmates who had exhausted all their legal options would be executed by firing squad without further delay.