[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

July 24



LIBYA:

Libya Frees Foreign Medical Workers in H.I.V. Case


6 medics sentenced to life in prison in Libya for allegedly infecting
children with HIV came home to Bulgaria on Tuesday and were greeted with
tears and hugs -- and a presidential pardon that allowed them to walk free
after 8 1/2 years behind bars.

The 5 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor were flown from Tripoli to
the jubilant welcome in Sofia on board a plane with French first lady
Cecilia Sarkozy and the European Union's commissioner for foreign affairs,
Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

EU officials said the bloc would move to improve trade and political ties
with Libya after the release.

Libya had accused the 6 of deliberately infecting more than 400 Libyan
children with HIV. 50 of the children died. The medics, jailed since 1999,
deny infecting the children and say their confessions were extracted under
torture.

The 6 originally had been sentenced to death, but that was later commuted
to life in prison. Last week, Tripoli had agreed to a Bulgarian request to
allow the 6 to serve the rest of their sentence at home.

''Led by the firm conviction in the innocence of the Bulgarian citizens
sentenced in Libya and fulfilling his constitutional rights, the president
signed a decree for pardon and releases them of their sentences,''
Bulgarian Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin said.

The 6 came down the steps from the airplane and were welcomed on the
tarmac by family members who hugged them, one lifting the Palestinian
doctor, Ashraf al-Hazouz, off the ground. Bulgaria granted him citizenship
last month.

''I waited so long for this moment,'' nurse Snezhana Dimitrova said before
falling in the arms of her loved ones.

Kristiana Valcheva, one of the released nurses, told reporters that
throughout their time in prison, they had kept alive the hope of freedom.

''We were afraid even to say aloud what we dreamed about,'' Valcheva said
with tears in her eyes.

''Now I still can't believe that I am standing on Bulgarian soil. We were
told the news at 4 o'clock in the morning and we left the jail at quarter
to 6 to board the plane,'' she said. ''Now I will try to get my previous
life back.''

>From the airport, the medics were whisked to a government residence in the
capital, where they will spend the next few days with their relatives and
away from the intense media coverage of their release.

Along with the release, Libya and the European Union agreed to develop a
''full partnership,'' with the Europeans promising a package of aid to
develop Libyan hospitals and other infrastructure, Libyan Foreign Minister
Abdul-Rahman Shalqam said.

Shalqam, who did not reveal how much aid the EU would provide, also said
the Bulgarian president had the right to pardon the medics.

''According to agreements between the two sides, it is the right of any
country after handing over the convicts to either implement the verdict or
to pardon them. It is the right of the Bulgarian president to issue this
pardon,'' Shalqam told reporters in Tripoli.

Under the agreement signed with Ferrero-Waldner, the EU promised to
provide ''lifelong treatment'' to the infected children as well as aid to
''improve the Benghazi Hospital'' where the children were infected,
Shalqam said. The EU also committed to ''provide other aid for education,
historical antiquities, as well as support for security on Libya's
northern and southern borders to combat illegal immigration,'' Shalqam
said.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said, however, that neither the EU nor
France paid money to Libya for the release. He said Qatar mediated the
release and hinted the Gulf country may have had a broader role in
resolving the crisis.

He also announced that he and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner
would be visiting Libya on Wednesday in a bid to ''help Libya rejoin the
international community.''

The French presidential palace said earlier that the deal included
measures to improve the medical care of children with AIDS in Libya. It
did not provide further details.

In Brussels, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said the EU
would move to improve trade and political ties with Libya after the
release.

''We hope to go on further (on) normalizing our relations with Libya. Our
relations with Libya were to a large extent blocked by the non-settlement
of this medics issue,'' Barroso told reporters.

He said the 27-nation bloc could move to include Libya in regional trade
and aid ties with other Mediterranean countries.

The five Bulgarian nurses traveled to Libya nearly a decade ago, attracted
by promises of higher paying jobs. They were sent through a Bulgarian
recruitment agency to al-Fath Children's Hospital in Libya's second
largest city of Benghazi. The nurses were arrested the year after their
arrival.

Some 60,000 Bulgarians were employed in the country in the 1980s,
according to Libyan officials, before the U.N. imposed sanctions in 1993
and the links between the 2 nations weakened.

*********************

Libya Frees Bulgarian Nurses in AIDS Case


5 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor sentenced to life in prison in
Libya for allegedly contaminating children with the AIDS virus left
Tripoli on Tuesday on board a plane with the French president's wife,
France's presidential palace said.


Until recent weeks, it was unclear how active a first lady of France
Ccilia Sarkozy would be. The delegation, which arrived in Tripoli on
Sunday to try to negotiate their release, includes the European Union
commissioner for foreign affairs, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, and the chief
French presidential aide, Claude Gueant.

The plane was heading to Bulgaria, the Elyse Palace said.

When President Nicolas Sarkozy was asked on television last month what
role his wife, Ccilia, would play as Frances first lady, he replied: "The
2 of us talk about it a lot. She's looking around. She's reflecting."

Now Mrs. Sarkozy, a 49-year-old former fashion model, has found her 1st
project: She is in Libya for the 2nd time in 2 weeks trying to persuade
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to free 5 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian
doctor convicted of having deliberately infected hundreds of Libyan
children with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.

Last week, Libya's highest judicial council commuted the death sentences
of the 6 medical workers to life in prison after the families of the
infected children each received $1 million. That opened the way for the
medical workers to be sent to Bulgaria, where they could be pardoned under
a 1984 prisoner exchange agreement Libya has with it.

Mr. and Mrs. Sarkozy are pressing for a speedy deal to get them out. Since
assuming the presidency, Mr. Sarkozy has begun a series of sweeping
foreign policy initiatives, including proposing to resolve the crisis in
Darfur and the final status of Kosovo and even suggesting the creation of
a new union of Mediterranean countries.

"What I know is that it's very tough," Mr. Sarkozy said Monday of the
French negotiations with Libya. He refused to comment on reports carried
by Libya's official news agency last week that he would be in Libya on
Wednesday, presumably if the workers were released.

The diplomatic initiative, which began in secret, has rattled European
Union and even French officials and has been fiercely criticized by
France's opposition Socialist Party.

The European Union administration in Brussels, which has been coordinating
negotiations for the medical workers' release since 2004, learned of Mrs.
Sarkozy's first trip to Libya on July 12 after she had landed there.

On Thursday, the European Union's foreign relations commissioner, Benita
Ferrero-Waldner, came to Paris and had a 45-minute 1-on-1 meeting with Mr.
Sarkozy. In it, she stressed the pitfalls of freelance diplomacy and of
dealing with the Libyan leader, and offered her help, officials familiar
with the meeting said.

When Mrs. Sarkozy arrived in Libya on Sunday, Ms. Ferrero-Waldner was by
her side.

The first lady's initiative, which is being run exclusively out of Mr.
Sarkozys office at the lyse Palace, has also left Foreign Minister Bernard
Kouchner and his staff at their headquarters at the Quai d'Orsay in
diplomatic darkness.

After the meeting with Mr. Sarkozy, Ms. Ferrero-Waldner met with Mr.
Kouchner, who asked several times what she and the president had discussed
about the case, according to 2 officials familiar with the meeting.
Because the meeting with Mr. Sarkozy had been confidential, she politely
declined to provide any details.

A number of European and French officials, who spoke on condition of
anonymity because of diplomatic rules, said Mrs. Sarkozy's mission was so
fraught with potential political missteps that they used the same word to
describe it: "dangerous."

Benot Hamon, a Socialist deputy in the European Parliament, accused Mr.
Sarkozy of showing new evidence of his "personal practice of power" and of
wanting to steal the spotlight from the work of the European Union "so
that Madame Sarkozy can strut around on the republican stage."

Portugal, meanwhile, which holds the 6-month rotating presidency of the
European Union and could have played the same lead diplomatic role in
negotiating the case as did Germany and Britain before it, seems to have
been sidelined.

"Why is the wife of the French president in Libya at the moment  you
should ask the French," said Clara Borja, the spokeswoman at the
Portuguese presidency. She added: "The Portuguese government has gone
through institutional channels. The wife of the French president is not
exactly an institution."

But the lyse Palace has defended Mrs. Sarkozy's diplomatic initiative as
part of her larger plan to be a first lady whose projects will change as
she sees fit.

"She doesn't want to close herself up in one role," said Catherine Pgard,
a senior adviser to the president. "She wants to do whatever is necessary
in a particular area. She will pass from one thing to another."

In one sense, Mrs. Sarkozy does not seem like a natural player in such
delicate bilateral diplomatic negotiations involving Europe and Libya. She
served in an informal role as her husband's closest personal adviser
during part of his time as interior minister, but has never before been
publicly identified with a foreign policy cause.

Until recent weeks, it was unclear how active a first lady she would be.
Long before her husband ran for president, she told a magazine
interviewer, "I don't see myself as a first lady  that bores me."

She has a unique fashion style, far different from that of the
buttoned-up, suited look of many of Mr. Sarkozy's female ministers. In
another sense, however, as Mr. Sarkozy's "personal emissary," she has
advantages that his aides do not have. As Claude Guant, Mr. Sarkozy's
secretary general and former campaign director, said on French television
after he accompanied Mrs. Sarkozy on the 1st trip, "Who can better
represent the president of the republic than his wife? With whom does he
have greater proximity?"

(source for both: Associated Press)

**************

Bulgarian Nurses, Freed by Libya, Arrive in Sofia


5 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who faced the death penalty
for infecting Libyan children with HIV, landed in Sofia after 8 years in a
Libyan prison.

The six medics were flown home in a French government plane early today.

Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov and Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev
met them at Sofia airport. French President Nicolas Sarkozy's wife,
Cecilia, and European Union foreign affairs commissioner Benita
Ferrero-Waldner, who negotiated their release with Libyan leader Muammar
Qaddafi, were with the medics.

Their return opens the way to normal relations between Libya and the EU's
27 member states. The French president said at a news conference in Paris
that he will fly to Tripoli tomorrow to see Qaddafi and "help Libya rejoin
the concert of nations.''

This "is a joyous day for Europe and Bulgaria, Ferrero- Waldner said in
Sofia. "This is a new page for Libya's relations with Europe.''

The 6 were allowed out under a prisoner-exchange accord between Bulgaria
and Libya under which they could serve their sentences at home. The
Bulgarian president pardoned them on arrival, meaning they went free
immediately. The Palestinian doctor was granted Bulgarian nationality last
month.

Presidential Pardon

"Guided by the firm conviction of the innocence of the Bulgarian citizens
unjustly convicted in Libya and using the power given to him by the
constitution, the Bulgarian President issued a decree pardoning them,''
Foreign Minister Ivailo Kalfin announced at Sofia airport.

European Commission President Jose Barroso said the release brought "a
moment of relief, emotion, of happiness.'' In a conversation with Qaddafi
yesterday, "I told him that, if this matter was settled, we will do our
best to further normalize'' relations, Barroso told reporters in Brussels.

Libya's High Judicial Council, its top legal body, on July 19 overturned
death sentences handed down in 2004. The 6 have been in custody since 1999
on charges they knowingly injected 426 Libyan children with HIV-tainted
blood while working at a Benghazi hospital. 56 of the children died. The
medical workers denied wrongdoing and said they were tortured to extract
confessions.

Lockerbie Bombing

The case prevented Libya from restoring ties with the U.S. and the EU
after years of sanctions following the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am airliner
over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 people died. In 2003, Libya agreed
to pay $2.7 billion in compensation to families of Lockerbie victims.

Bulgaria, which joined the EU on Jan. 1 and is part of the U.S.-led
coalition in Iraq, sought international support to help free the nurses.
It worked with international aid organizations to set up a fund to treat
the infected children and improve care in the Benghazi hospital.

Cecilia Sarkozy first visited Libya on July 12 and saw the jailed medics
and families of some of the infected children. She also met twice with
Qaddafi, the Elysee Palace, the French presidency, said at the time.
Accompanied by Elysee secretary- general Claude Gueant, she returned to
Tripoli for the final negotiations on July 22.

Death Sentences

The medics' sentences were commuted after the families of the infected
children dropped their death-sentence demands in return for $460 million
in compensation negotiated with the help of the EU and Libya's Qaddafi
Foundation, Kalfin said.

"Neither Europe nor France made the slightest financial contribution to
Libya,'' Sarkozy said today.

The death sentences were first handed down in 2004 and confirmed by a
court in Tripoli in December 2006 and by Libya's Supreme Court on July 16.

Judges in the original trial rejected the testimony of French, Italian and
Swiss scientists who said the infections were caused by poor hygiene
before the nurses worked at the hospital. Luc Montagnier, of Paris's
Pasteur Institute and co-discoverer of the AIDS virus, was among the
scientists who testified in the medics' defense.

"I still can't believe that I am standing on Bulgarian soil,'' Kristiana
Valcheva, 1 of the 5 nurses, told state Channel 1 television. "I want my
life to return to what it was before all this happened.''

Prime Minister Stanishev said the outcome was "the result of concentrated
efforts of several Bulgarian governments and of the very strong solidarity
and support of the European Union.''

The medics, after a physical checkup, will be taken to the Boyana
government residence where President Parvanov and the prime minister have
their official homes, he told Channel 1.

"They will spend several days in Boyana with their relatives to start
their recovery after everything they've been through,'' Stanishev said.

(source: Bloomberg News)

***************

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL PRESS RELEASE


AI Index: MDE 19/xxx/2007 (Public) ---- News Service No: xxx 24 July 2007

Libya: Amnesty International welcomes release of medics

The release of 6 foreign medical workers today is a very welcome move
which brings an end to a case which has been riddled with injustice and
has caused enormous suffering to all involved  the 6 medics who were twice
sentenced to death and the families of children who became infected with
HIV at a Benghazi hospital.

"This is a welcome decision on the part of the Libyan authorities," said
Malcolm Smart, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North
Africa Programme. "They should now proceed to implementing much-needed
reforms to the criminal justice system to ensure that nothing like this
can ever happen again in Libya."

The release of the medics  5 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who
was given Bulgarian citizenship last month  was reportedly sealed
following a deal struck between Libya and the EU to improve ties.
Formally, the medics were transferred to Bulgaria by Libya under a
prisoner exchange agreement between the 2 countries and then pardoned soon
after their arrival by Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov.

The release follows a decision last week by Libya's Supreme Council of
Judicial Bodies to commute the death sentences that had originally been
imposed on the medics in 2004 after they were convicted of deliberately
infecting over 400 Libyan children with HIV.

The 6 consistently denied the charge and allege that they were tortured in
detention to make them "confess". Their first death sentence was
overturned on appeal by the Supreme Court, but they were again convicted
and sentenced to death after a second trial in 2006. Negotiations, in
which the Gaddafi Development Foundation, headed by one of Libyan leader
Mu'ammar al-Gaddafi's sons, reportedly played a key role, resulted in
agreement that the families of the children infected with HIV should
benefit financially from an international fund in return for the death
sentences against the doctor and nurses being commuted.

Amnesty International welcomed the commutation of the death sentences last
week but criticized the life prison terms that were substituted and
reiterated its appeal for the medics to be released and reunited with
their families.

(source: Amnesty International)






INDONESIA:

AFP role still mystifies Rush


With the challenge to his death sentence just weeks away, Scott Rush, the
youngest of the Bali Nine, talks about life in limbo.

Scott Rush, facing death by firing squad in Indonesia, still cannot
understand why the Australian Federal Police allowed the Bali Nine to be
arrested in a death-penalty country and why his sentence is harsher than a
fellow drug courier.

In 3 wide-ranging interviews with The Bulletin, Rush, 21, the youngest
member of the Bali Nine, tells of his "self harm'' episodes, ongoing
tensions within the group, and his hopes for a last-gasp legal challenge
to his death sentence.

"I don't understand why the Feds put us in this position," he says. "I
still don't understand it. And I don't see why I'm on the death penalty.
I'm one of the ones who had stuff on me. Yet Renae [Lawrence] got 20 years
and she's clearly more involved. I was carrying the stuff and had less to
do with the organisers."

Resentment and suspicion linger among the Bali Nine and Rush admits to
feelings of guilt for introducing cellmate Michael Czugaj to trip
recruiter Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, also facing death.

"I still feel guilty and probably always will,'' Rush says. "But in the
end, I blame myself. And he made the same stupid decision that I did."

Asked about thin, superficial wounds on his forearms, Rush admits to
harming himself with a sharp piece of metal: "I just had a stressful day.
Renae [Lawrence] punched a wall and broke her wrist. This is what I did."

In September last year, Rush appealed against his sentence, only to have
it upgraded to the death penalty.

He is the only 1 of the 4 heroin mules - caught at Denpasar Airport in
April 2005 - to have been sentenced to death by firing squad. He is now
placing his faith in a constitutional challenge, which centres on whether
drug crimes should be considered serious enough to warrant the death
penalty in Indonesia.

(source: The Bulletin)