Sept. 20
INDIA:
Ending judicial murder
There has been a movement for abolition of death penalty, and so far 97
countries have joined the list of 'abolitionist states.'
There can be no 2 opinions that the perpetrators of the most heinous crime of
rape and brutal assault of the 23-year-old physiotherapist in Delhi on December
16 last year, which later resulted in her death, deserved exemplary punishment
and they have rightly been brought to justice in a record time of nine months.
But the mass hysteria and the near-celebration of the awarding of death
sentence to the 4 culprits is highly disturbing, and, on calmer examination,
unbecoming of a civilised society because it amounts to yielding to baser
instinct of revenge rather than seeking justice and reformation.
We have a lot to learn from Mahatma Gandhi to whom the quote, "an eye for an
eye makes everyone blind," is attributed, though it is possibly a postulation
that Gandhi's famous biographer Louis Fischer made to explain Gandhi's approach
to conflict and his philosophy of non-violence. It is unfortunate that with the
Nirbhaya case, India's civilisational march against death penalty - there were
only three cases of judicial murder through hanging in the last 17 years -
could be taking a reverse turn.
When the judgment in the Delhi rape case was handed down on September 13, the
prime minister downwards everyone lauded the verdict, as almost the entire
nation, led by the shrieking electronic media, cheered. Since then we have all
settled down to our daily routine, hardly paying attention to any number of
rape, murder and sexual assault cases being reported from across the country.
Sitting down to write this article on Friday morning and glancing at the
newspaper in front of me, I find there are at least four prominent rape cases
being reported: Mumbai police submit a 600-page charge sheet against the 4
accused in the Mumbai photojournalist's rape case; a 35-year-old woman
allegedly gangraped by 4 persons including a police constable in Andhra
Pradesh; a 17-year-old girl raped by her brother-in-law in Odisha; and a
cabinet minister in Rajasthan, who had allegedly raped a woman at his official
residence last week and later threatened her with murder, forced to resign.
This is just a sample and for every case reported, there are hundreds of cases
which go unregistered and unreported. Statistics with the National Crimes
Records Bureau (NCRB) show that there were more than 2,20,000 violent crimes
against women reported in 2011, though the actual number is likely to be much
higher.
Violence against women and generally all types of violence can be brought down
with the certainty and swiftness of punishment rather than the quantum and
severity of it. The outpouring of public anger after the Nirbhaya case could
have played a role in the special court's verdict to award death penalty to all
the 4 accused youth. But we need to understand that the anger, frustration and
clamour for justice has to do more with lethargic police investigations and
inordinate judicial delays that allow the culprits to roam free, than demanding
that the state turn into a murderer.
Recorded evidence
The argument against death penalty is numerous and incontrovertible. Apart from
the fact that there could be miscarriage of justice and wrongful conviction -
for which there are any number of recorded evidence not only in India but other
countries as well - the interpretation of law tends to be personalised and
arbitrary. In 1983, the Supreme Court of India introduced the concept of
???rarest of rare cases' for awarding death penalty, but how and where does one
draw the line?
The NCRB records show that the Indian courts have sentenced 1,455 prisoners to
death between 2001 and 2011, and during the same period, sentences of 4,321
prisoners were commuted to life imprisonment. Currently, there are 477 people
condemned to death row and languishing in jail for years, in some cases, for
more than 20 years. Studies conducted by the Amnesty International and the
People's Union of Civil Liberties have shown that the process of deciding who
should or shouldn't be on death row is arbitrary and biased. The Supreme Court
itself has admitted on several occasions that "there is confusion and
contradiction" in the application of death penalty.
Last year, 14 eminent retired judges, including Supreme Court judges who had
been part of the benches which had awarded death sentence, wrote to the
President of India pointing out that "the Supreme Court had erroneously given
death penalty to 15 people since 1966, of whom 2 had been hanged."
The judges called this, "The gravest known miscarriage of justice in the
history of crime and punishment in independent India."
In the last 30 years, there has been a movement for abolition of capital
punishment all over the world and 97 countries have joined the list of
'abolitionist states.' Only around 58 countries including China, Japan, India,
USA, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and Singapore continue the practice, though
there are growing voices against it. The United Nations General Assembly has
passed 4 resolutions since 2007 calling for moratorium on executions, but India
and USA, the 2 biggest democracies, have always voted against it.
Does death penalty really act as a deterrent to serious crimes such as murder,
rape, robbery, dacoity and so on? Extensive studies done in the United States -
a country which is sharply divided on death sentence - show that over the last
decade the districts that have abolished death sentence have actually been
recording less murders than those that have retained death penalty. The South,
which accounts for 82 % of the executions in the United States (1,101 out of
1,244 between 2001 and 2011), regularly has the highest murder rate compared to
the rest of the country.
In the US, there are any number of institutions and lobby groups that take up
the cases of convicted people, exposing fallacies and misrepresentation of
facts used to convict them, including the phenomena of false confessions
(people admitting to murders or other crimes they have never committed), grave
errors in the presentation of forensic results and so on.
In a landmark work, the National Registry of Exonerations, a joint project
taken up by the University of Michigan Law School and the Centre on Wrongful
Conviction has compiled a list of around 1,200 known exonerations since 1989 of
people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes, including those who were
wrongly sentenced to death. The registry has given new hope for many more
persons facing dubious convictions.
As a democratic society, can we in India take up such egalitarian initiatives,
instead of baying for more blood?
(source: Ramakrishna Upadhya,, Deccan Herald)
IRAN:
Halt the execution of 4 Kurds on death row -- 4 Sunni Muslim men from Iran's
Kurdish minority are at risk of execution within days.
The Iranian authorities must urgently halt the execution of 4 Sunni Muslim men
from Iran's Kurdish minority who could be executed within days, Amnesty
International said.
"The death penalty is a cruel and inhuman punishment and represents a flagrant
violation of human rights. The death sentences of these men must be immediately
revoked and a re-trial in line with international standards must be ordered,"
said Hassiba Hadj Saharoui, Amnesty International's Deputy Director for the
Middle East and North Africa.
Jamshid Dehgani, his younger brother, Jahangir Dehgani, Hamed Ahmadi and Kamal
Molayee were arrested in 2009. They were accused along with 6 others of
involvement in the assassination of a senior Sunni cleric with ties to the
Iranian authorities. They have denied any involvement, saying that their arrest
and detention preceded the assassination by several months. They were sentenced
to death after being convicted of the vaguely-worded offences including "enmity
against God" and "corruption on earth". Their death sentences have recently
been upheld by the Supreme Court and a prison official at Ghezel Hesar Prison,
near Tehran, where they are held, has told them informally that their
executions will be carried out in a matter of days.
The trials of the men were marred by allegations of flaws in the judicial
process. The 4 men were denied access to a lawyer before and during their trial
and were allegedly subjected to torture and other ill-treatment while in
detention. The men also said that they received threats that their family
members would be arrested and were forced to sign papers without being allowed
to read them.
"4 men risk being executed at any time when they say that their arrest and
detention took place before the crime they have been convicted for and that
they have been tortured. The Iranian authorities continue to rely extensively
on the death penalty with little regard for judicial guarantees and certainly
not as a measure of last resort," Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui said.
"The idea that men could be executed when so many doubts surround the case and
the legal proceedings is deeply disturbing."
There are at least another 26 Sunni Muslim men, mostly from Iran's Kurdish
minority, on death row in Raja'i Shahr Prison in Karaj, north-west of Tehran.
Amnesty International has serious concerns that these men may have been tried
in court proceedings falling short of fair trial standards.
Amnesty International urges the Iranian authorities to immediately commute all
death sentences, including those imposed for drugs offences and on juvenile
offenders in contravention of international law, and to impose a moratorium on
executions as a 1st step towards abolishing the death penalty.
The news of the imminent execution comes shortly after the Iranian authorities
released 11 political prisoners, including Nasrin Sotoudeh, a prominent
human-rights lawyer, on 18 September. This move could be seen as a calculated
measure ahead of the United Nations General Assembly unless it is followed by
concrete steps to improve the country's human rights situation. Iran's new
President Hassan Rouhani is expected to speak at the UN General Assembly in New
York on 24 September 2013.
"There are countless serious human rights violations still ongoing in Iran that
must be addressed. Releasing a handful of political prisoners and prisoners of
conscience means very little if it does not signal a fundamental shift in
Iran's stance on human rights," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.
"The Iranian authorities cannot continue to rely so heavily on the death
penalty to deal with dissent or social ills such as drug trafficking. They must
overhaul their penal code."
So far there are no indications that the election of President Rouhani in June
has led to changes in Iran's reliance on the death penalty.
Iran remains the 2nd biggest executor in the world, after China. The Iranian
authorities have officially acknowledged that so far this year, 236 executions
have been carried out, including 23 in September alone. However, reliable
sources have reported at least 160 additional executions took place in 2013.
Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception.
(source: Amnesty International)
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