Act of Free Choice

Act of Free Choice (Indonesian: Penentuan Pendapat Rakyat, PEPERA) was a series of eight regional assemblies from July to August 1969 by which Indonesia asserts that the Western New Guinea population decided to relinquish their sovereignty in favor of Indonesian citizenship. The Act of Free Choice was a vote by 1,025 men and women selected by the Indonesian military in Western New Guinea, who were asked to vote by raising their hands or reading from prepared scripts in a display for United Nations observers. The event was noted by the United Nations in General Assembly resolution 2504 (XXIV) without qualification whether it complied with the authorizing New York Agreement, and without qualification whether it was an act of "self-determination" as referred to and described in United Nations General Assembly resolutions 1514 and 1541 (XV) respectively.

Background

The referendum and its conduct had been specified in the New York Agreement; Article 17 of which in part says:

The agreement continues with Article 18:

Free will

Free will is the ability to choose between different possible courses of action. It is closely linked to the concepts of responsibility, praise, guilt, sin, and other judgments which apply only to actions that are freely chosen. It is also connected with the concepts of advice, persuasion, deliberation, and prohibition. Traditionally, only actions that are freely willed are seen as deserving credit or blame. There are numerous different concerns about threats to the possibility of free will, varying by how exactly it is conceived, which is a matter of some debate.

Some conceive free will to be the capacity for an agent to make choices in which the outcome has not been determined by past events. Determinism suggests that only one course of events is possible, which is inconsistent with the existence of such free will. This problem has been identified in ancient Greek philosophy, and remains a major focus of philosophical debate. This view that conceives free will to be incompatible with determinism is called incompatibilism, and encompasses both metaphysical libertarianism, the claim that determinism is false and thus free will is at least possible, and hard determinism, the claim that determinism is true and thus free will is not possible. It also encompasses hard incompatibilism, which holds not only determinism but also its negation to be incompatible with free will, and thus free will to be impossible whatever the case may be regarding determinism.