Show trials

A show trial is a judicial travesty whose real purpose is to manufacture propaganda.

An especially clumsy example was the sentencing in Indonesia in 1993 of an East Timor rebel leader to life imprisonment, part of a continuing campaign to justify Indonesian annexation in 1975 of the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. The presiding judge spent seven hours reading a 250-page verdict, but the accused was unable to read his own 27-page defence because it was deemed "irrelevant". Human rights groups can recall no previous political trial in Indonesia in which the defence statement was suppressed by judges.