The Australian "approach" to "diplomacy" was awful to anybody with the faintest sense of Indonesian culture or politics. We have a tightly controlled corporate media in Aus which was whipping up a firestorm over this and arousing public fervor.

Maybe if it was more tactful it could have been more constructive. That said, I doubt Jokowi would've budged at all.

I don't think the two deserved death. I think they both deserved a commutation to a life sentence. They both already served ten years, and in that time, had made enormous contributions to the community at Kerobokan. They clearly reformed. Were they pardoned from death, for the rest of their live they could've had much positive impact on other prisoners and the rest of the community. This would've been a clear social benefit. Killing them and justifying it by the social harm drugs cause is not pragmatic considering the benefits of their reformation. It is only pragmatic because it was politically advantageous.

A note on sovereignty: obviously it's an important issue for decolonized nation states. In the West we don't have much respect for sovereignty, this is because much of the Western world is under the influence of the hegemony of the US which loves to violate sovereignty. In terms of the Western international community, the reason why the sovereignty argument fell out of favour was because the West respected the Ottoman's sovereignty (genocide of Armenians) and the Nazi's sovereignty (genocides of Jews, Roma, Slavs, etc.). This is why the West loves the human rights megaphone - because killing people in the name of sovereignty has been shown to be bad when taken to extremes.

That said, the West was happy to endorse Suharto's Jakartan sovereignty over the invasion and genocide in East Timor. Maybe that should be recognised the next time anti-Western sentiment is drummed up over "meddling" in the execution of foreign nationals. If Indo law was at all consistent re: "those who cause mass harm and death should be killed", most of the New Order administration and much of the Indonesian military should've been put against the wall.