Referendum or popular consultation
Act of Free Choice, 1969
A disputed plebiscite of hand-selected representatives resulted in West Papua's integration into Indonesia.
What happened
The Act of Free Choice, held 14 July-2 August 1969, saw 1,025 hand-selected Papuan representatives vote unanimously for integration into Indonesia; UN observers and journalists at the time criticized the process as coercive and unrepresentative.[1]
Sources for this page
Each number marks a specific claim. Notes give the source, its locator and how it relates to the claim.
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1.
Claim: The Act of Free Choice, a plebiscite held from 14 July to 2 August 1969 under the terms of the 1962 New York Agreement, resulted in a unanimous vote by 1,025 Papuan representatives, hand-selected by the Indonesian military from an estimated population of around 800,000, in favour of West Papua's integration into Indonesia. Contemporaneous criticism, including from Reuters journalist Hugh Lunn and from the UN observer team led by Fernando Ortiz-Sanz (whose own assessment estimated around 95% of Papuans actually supported independence), characterized the process as coercive, unrepresentative, and lacking the individual secret ballot envisaged by the New York Agreement; the event has since been referred to by critics as the "Act of No Choice." This bundle presents these criticisms as attributed assessments and does not independently re-adjudicate the vote's legal validity.
- Act of Free Choice (Wikipedia) link, What It Was, Voting Numbers, Outcome and Major Criticisms sections. Source record