1) 3,000 Papuans to get PNG citizenship
2) PNG citizens get visa-free access to Indonesia
3) Ethics Council to Send Police After Oilman Riza if He Misses Monday’s Hearing
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1) 3,000 Papuans to get PNG citizenship
Indonesian and West Papuan girls play in a market in Jayapura.Photo: RNZ / Koroi Hawkins
Updated at 6:42 am today
Papua New Guinea's deputy chief migration officer says processes are underway to grant citizenship to about 3,000 West Papuan refugees.
Esther Gaegamin says there are about 3,000 West Papuan refugees in camps in the Western Province, near the Indonesian border, that have been registered with the government.
She says most of them are qualified for PNG citizenship and her office has commenced a registration and naturalisation project with them.
Ms Gaegamin told the newspaper, The National, that some of the West Papuans have been in PNG for decades and it's appropriate that they are given a home and legal rights.
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2) PNG citizens get visa-free access to Indonesia
Updated at 3:56 pm today
Indonesia's government has relaxed tourist travel requirements to allow Papua New Guineans visa-free access to Indonesia.
The newspaper, The National, reports the Indonesian Ambassador in PNG, Ronald JP Manik, as saying that ordinary PNG passport carriers wanting to visit Indonesia as tourists do not require a visa to enter.
He said the relaxing of the travel requirement was agreed to recently between the two governments.
Mr Manik said the arrangement should allow more Papua New Guineans to visit Indonesia since there would be a flight connecting Mt Hagen's Kagamuga airport to Indonesia from next year.
The ambassador also said that as PNG was the only country that shared a land border with Indonesia, the visa-free arrangement would help ease the flow of trade traffic through the main border access point between Jayapura and PNG’s Vanimo.
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3) Ethics Council to Send Police After Oilman Riza if He Misses Monday’s Hearing
By : Jakarta Globe | on 5:38 PM December 13, 2015
Jakarta. The House of Representatives’ Ethics Council has threatened to sic the police on oilman Muhammad Riza Chalid if he fails to testify in a tribunal into an alleged shakedown attempt by House Speaker Setya Novanto.
Riza was scheduled to testify on Dec. 4 in the case, which is quickly unfurling as one of the biggest corruption scandals in Indonesia’s history, but failed to appear. The police chief said earlier this week that he had left the country, but his current whereabouts are unknown.
With one summons snubbed, Ethics Council member Sukiman said the council could enlist the help of the police to bring Riza in if he fails to appear again on Monday.
“If we can't summon [Riza] the first and second time around, then the third time we can ask law enforcers to summon him by force,” he said on Sunday as quoted by Detik.
Riza and Setya are accused of trying to shake down Freeport Indonesia chief executive Maroef Sjamsuddin for a 20 percent stake in the copper and gold miner, valued at an estimated $4 billion.
Maroef secretly recorded the conversation during a meeting in June, but it was only last month that Sudirman Said, the energy minister, submitted a copy of the recording, along with a transcript, to the House Ethics Council when filing a complaint against Setya.
Both Sudirman and Maroef have testified at the tribunal, corroborating each other’s claims that Setya and Riza demanded shares in both Freeport Indonesia and in a power plant that it plans to build.
In exchange, the recording indicates, Setya and Riza promised to speed up the miner’s contract extension negotiations with the government before the 2019 start date
National Police chief Gen. Badrodin Haiti has said that Riza was likely “hiding in an Asian country.”
He added that it would be difficult for Indonesia to seek extradition of Riza from wherever he had fled, given that the ongoing inquiry was an ethics tribunal not a criminal investigation, and thus he could not be formally charged with any crime.
“If [Riza] is still here [in Indonesia] we can force him to testify but we can’t do that after he already left the country,” Badrodin said on Tuesday.
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