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CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Australia's government will support clemency appeals by four Australians whose penalties for drug trafficking have been increased from life in prison to the death sentence by an Indonesian court, the foreign minister said Wednesday.
Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Indonesian Supreme Court officials confirmed to Australian diplomats in Jakarta that a harsher punishment has been handed down, hours after the news broke in Australian media reports late Tuesday.
"We will, at the appropriate time, support appeals for clemency," Downer told reporters. "We are grateful that the Indonesians are being tough on drugs, it's just that we don't support capital punishment."
The Indonesian appeals court sentenced Australians Scott Rush, 20, Tan Duc Than Nguyen, 23, Si Yi Chen, 21, and Matthew Norman, 19, to death, Indonesian officials said Wednesday. They join two other Australians from the same trafficking ring awaiting a firing squad on death row.
A district court originally sentenced the four to life in prison for trying to take more than 8 kilograms (18 pounds) of heroin from Indonesia's resort island of Bali to their homeland last year.
The four can further appeal through a judicial review if they can pinpoint any legal errors in the proceedings. Their last avenue of appeal is to seek clemency from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.
"What the president will do, I have no idea," Downer said of the expected clemency appeals.
Downer said he was surprised that the convicts' lawyers were not the first to be advised and that the Supreme Court had opted for more serious sentences than the prosecutors requested.
"In terms of the procedures, I must say they have been, to say the least, a little unusual in that the first we heard about this was through the media," Downer said.
"The Indonesian Supreme Court's clearly taken the view that trafficking in heroin is a profoundly grave offense," he added.
Rush's father, Lee Rush of the east coast city of Brisbane, discovered that his son had been sentenced to face a firing squad when he was contacted by a reporter late Tuesday.
"We were quite dumbfounded," Lee Rush told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. "It came totally out of the blue."
He added: "We did not expect this decision at all."
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