Editorial: Not such a tourist idyll after all

Quite apart from the principle of capital punishment, which we utterly reject, the death sentence passed by an Indonesian court on a British cocaine-smuggler in Bali looks excessive on at least two counts. First, it seems out of all proportion to the 20-year prison term received by the bomb-maker for the 2002 Bali nightclub atrocity in which more than 200 people died, and second, it is of quite a different order from the 15-year term requested by the prosecution. An appeal is to be launched, but we hope there is some way that the Indonesian judiciary can commute the sentence sooner.

Especially bizarre, though, was the way the judges defended the sentence, arguing that Lindsay Sandiford had weakened the government's fight against drugs and damaged Bali's image as a tourist destination. How, we wonder, might the island's image as a tourist idyll be compromised if this execution went ahead?