His comments will send shockwaves through Kerobokan Prison, where two Bali Nine inmates, Australians Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan, applied more than two years ago to the president's office for clemency.

Taken at face value, Mr Joko's new policy will condemn them and at least 62 other drug prisoners in Indonesian jails to the firing squad.

Mr Joko said the dossiers of drug convicts had sat for years untouched on the president's desk under his predecessor, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

"I'm asking now, what should I do? For years no decisions have been taken. I say now I will issue no pardon for drugs [criminals]," said the president during an appearance at a Yogyakarta State University for Human Rights Day.

In his comments, Mr Joko used both the words grasi (clemency) and pengampunan (pardon).

The shock comments come just a week after the president announced, through his ministers, that five convicts would be executed by the end of the month. Though they have not been named, it's believed all five on the list are drug traffickers.

Drugs are considered a public menace in Indonesia, and any move to appear soft on the issue is highly unpopular, as Dr Yudhoyono discovered when he gave a five-year sentence cut to Australian Schapelle Corby.

Mr Joko appears to have adopted the argument put by his anti-narcotics agency, BNN, that the death penalty will cure Indonesia of the problem.

"We all realise that Indonesia is now on high alert for drugs. Every day there are 40 to 50 Indonesians, especially our young generation, who died due to drugs. Every day," Mr Joko said.

But his approach has seriously disappointed Indonesia's human rights establishment, who expected him to have a less hardline approach.

The country's National Human Rights Commission, Komnas Ham, said earlier this week that the Indonesian legal system was not yet robust and uncorrupt enough to be trusted to take people's lives.

Amnesty International has urged Mr Joko to introduce a moratorium on the death penalty. Under Indonesia's constitution, the president has the power and the ability to consider cases one by one, and decide on clemency.

Chan and Sukumaran have argued that, since their conviction over an attempted heroin trafficking operation in 2005, they have turned their lives around, setting up a number of rehabilitation centres within the prison which have earned the endorsement of a number of officials including the Kerobokan prison governor.

One of the lawyers for Chan and Sukumaran, Melbourne-based Julian McMahon, said Indonesia was rightfully proud of its record of obtaining the release of more than 200 of its own citizens — mostly low-paid guest workers — from death row in other countries.

"No other government or NGO in the world has rescued so many people from death row in such a short time," Mr McMahon said.

He would not comment on recent developments.

with Karuni Rompies