Oct. 21
MALAYSIA:
Iranian chemist held in RM17.9mil syabu bust
Federal police have detained an Iranian chemist allegedly working for an
international drug trafficking syndicate when they seized syabu worth about
RM17.9 million from a drug-processing laboratory at a store in Klang last week.
The syabu, which was in liquid form, was meant for both local and international
markets.
Another Iranian and 2 locals were also arrested to facilitate investigations
into the drug seizure and activities at the store located in Kampung Padang
Jawa.
All the suspects, aged between 23 and 34, were picked up in separate raids in
Kampung Padang Jawa and Petaling Jaya last Friday.
They will be investigated under 39B of the Dangerous Drugs Act 1952 which
carries the mandatory death penalty upon conviction.
Bukit Aman CID director (Narcotics) Datuk Noor Rashid Ibrahim said a team of
policemen raided the store in Kampung Padang Jawa about 8.30pm, following
information that it was used as a venue for a drug-processing laboratory.
"In the raid, the police detained three people, including the suspected Iranian
chemist and 2 locals, and seized 89.32kg in liquid syabu, drug-making
paraphernalia and an assortment of chemicals," he told a press conference here
today.
About 4 hours later, he said the police nabbed another man suspected to have
links with the drug syndicate, in Petaling Jaya following a chase from Jalan
Syed Putra over the man's refusal to heed the police order to stop his car.
"Earlier, the man had tried to ram the police team with his car, forcing the
policemen to fire twice at his vehicle's tyres before arrested the suspect,"
said Noor Rashid.
The narcotics director said that based on initial investigations, an
international drug-trafficking syndicate masterminded by an Iranian, was in
league with its local counterpart.
"We believe the Iranian chemist under detention is well-versed with processing
drugs," he added.
On the Iranian drug connection, Noor Rashid noted that this was the 1st time
that the foreigners had used a remote area to process drugs, deviating from the
norm of using condominium units for drug-processing.
"This new tactic is to prevent detection of their activities," he said, adding
that the seized syabu was meant for local and international distribution.
(source: Bernama)
INDONESIA:
Calls to End the Death Penalty Continue
As far as legal issues go, few are as contentious as the death penalty. The
United Nations announced that the drive to end this form of punishment
continues to pick up steam and by the end of last year, 140 countries had
abolished it officially or on a de facto basis according to human rights group
Amnesty International.
But much still needs to be done, as 58 countries, including Indonesia, still
apply judicial execution.
"The death penalty doesn't deter crime, and it's liable to claim the lives of
innocent people," Italian ambassador to Indonesia Federico Failla said during a
discussion at the Italian Cultural Institute in Jakarta last week.
"Besides, any measure that is carried out with an element of vengeance
shouldn't be in the legal code," he added.
The talk was part of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty's campaign
on the issue. The movement of 145 non-government organizations held its 11th
World Day Against the Death Penalty on Oct. 10.
Italy has a special place in the history of campaigns against state executions.
On "Cities for Life Day," coming up on Nov. 30, cities around the world
celebrate the first recorded successful campaign for the abolition of the death
penalty. Over 2 centuries ago, the then state of Tuscany made a series of
modern "rationalist" criminal law reforms, including doing away with
executions, on Nov. 30, 1786.
Italy was again at the forefront of reforms, Failla said, when the modern state
became the first country to place a moratorium on death sentences after World
War II.
Failla's fellow envoy, European Union Ambassador Olaf Skoog, reinforced the
importance of reform.
"The abolition of the death penalty is integral to human rights and is
therefore a global issue, as it has to do with the right to live. The European
Union will also maintain its stance against the death penalty by urging
countries that legalize it, like Indonesia, to restrict its use," he said. "But
Indonesia is making progress by abstaining on a recent European Union
resolution against the death penalty instead of voting against it. The
increasing debate on the issue in Indonesia itself is also an encouraging
sign."
Director of local human rights group Imparsial, Poengky Indarti, says Indonesia
still has a long way to go.
"Indonesia's use of the death penalty is a holdover from Dutch colonial law,
although the Netherlands itself abolished it in 1983. Currently there are 133
prisoners on death row, more than 1/2 of whom were found guilty of
narcotics-related crimes," she said. "The situation overseas is even more grim.
Migrant Care estimates up to 420 Indonesians, more than half of them migrant
workers, are on death row in countries like Malaysia and Saudi Arabia."
Poengky added that the death penalty's negative effect is magnified by
Indonesia's dysfunctional, corrupt political and legal system.
"The execution of inmates on death row is often used for political reasons,
particularly during an election year," she said. "For instance, the number of
people who were executed a year before the 2009 elections stood at ten, up from
4 or 5 in other years. A similar number of inmates are set to be executed this
year as well."
Justice system officials are also known to extort bribes from prisoners seeking
to avoid the death penalty, she added.
"But since many are from the less affluent segments of society, their inability
to pay up leads to their execution," Poengky said.
"The Islamic parties, many of whom favor the retention of the death penalty on
grounds that it is sanctioned by the Koran, are averse to executing convicted
terrorists because of their belief that those men's actions are part of an
American or Jewish conspiracy," she said. "Military personnel also manage to
avoid the death penalty, among them Kopassus or other special forces men such
as those who perpetrated the murders at the Cebongan Penitentiary in
Yogyakarta, as well as intelligence agents like Pollycarpus and Muchdi
Purwopranjono, who murdered human rights activist Munir in 2005."
"It also takes an emotional and mental toll on inmates waiting for years on end
in death row," she said. "Life imprisonment is a better penalty, as it allows
the inmates to ponder their actions."
(source: Jakarta Globe)
INDIA:
Yakub Memon in plea for presidential mercy
Yakub Memon, sentenced to death for involvement in the 1993 Mumbai terror
blasts, has filed a mercy petition with President Pranab Mukherjee.
The mercy petition has been sent to the Union home ministry which in turn has
sought the Maharashtra government's opinion. Yakub Abdul Razak Memon is the
brother of Tiger Memon, the alleged mastermind and absconding key conspirator
in the horrific 1993 Mumbai serial blasts that killed 257 people.
2 decades have passed since the country witnessed its first major coordinated
serial terror blasts in Mumbai.
Keen to fast-track decisions particularly in terror-related cases, top sources
in the home ministry said that a move is afoot to ask states to firm up their
opinions within a set time-frame so that the "rarest of rare" cases where
capital punishment has been awarded to the convicts do not drag on for years.
It has been the experience of the home ministry that state governments have
taken years to send their opinion on mercy petitions filed with the President.
This has resulted in a string of cases where death-row convicts are going back
to the Supreme Court seeking commutation of their sentence citing "delay" in
deciding their mercy plea.
The death row convicts contend that they have already spent decades in jail.
With the Supreme Court pulling up the Centre and state governments over the
delay in deciding the mercy petitions, the MHA is planning to ask states to
send their opinions with a stipulated time frame to enable the government to
firm up its view and place it before the President for a final decision.
On March 21 2013, the Supreme Court had upheld the death penalty awarded to
Memon by the designated Tada court.
The bench said Memon was the "driving force" and had played a key role in the
conspiracy which "warranted death penalty".
It also noted that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence was also involved in
the 1993 blasts and the accused were trained in Pakistan.
Memon is the sole convict awarded death sentence by the apex court. In July
2013, the apex court also dismissed the petitions filed by Memon and his 3
family members, awarded life term in the terror blast case, seeking review of
its judgement.
(source: Asian Age)
******************
It's time India abolished the death penalty
Does the injunction, thou shalt not kill, apply to the state's death penalty?
The International Commission of Jurists, Geneva (of which I am now an Hony.
Commissioner) has correctly declared: "Capital punishment is state sanctioned
vengeance. The deliberate and premeditated act of taken of taking a human life
can never constitute a form of justice. It is an irreversible form of
punishment that we have seen time and again cannot be administered without some
degree of subjectivity and arbitrariness."
Revenge
On 30 December 2013, Justice Dattu, speaking for three judges, in Gudda's case
(murder of a man, wife and 5 year son because of the man's association with the
accused's wife), prophetically and wisely said: "In a civilized society - a
tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye ought not to be the criterion to clothe
a case within the rarest of rare (death penalty)... jacket."
Public protests have led to productive judicial reforms in India - but have
also increased the pressure on judges to hand down death sentences
It was also reiterated that "...awarding of life sentence is the rule."
The 4 legs on which justifications for the death penalty stands are: revenge,
deterrence, reform and just desserts. Justice Dattu has knocked off one of the
justifications. He accepts that deterrence may be a reason in a "diabolical"
case. But, "revenge" - whether sought by the complainant or collectively by the
crowd, media or public as in the Nirbhaya rape - cannot be a reason for the
death penalty.
This clarification by Justice Dattu comes at a timely juncture. What the court
is saying: Forget eye-for-an-eye. Forget deterrence in all except diabolical
cases. The test is: no death sentence unless it is diabolically rarest of rare.
It follows that 'rarest of rare' does not include revenge.
The punishment tariff does not pay enough attention to reform of the accused
(in terms of clean records, good pre-trial behaviour and future possibilities).
Consistent with the others, the test has to be: Is the convict totally beyond
redemption and reform?
Parliament attack convict Mohammed Afzal Guru was executed by India in February
this year
What is courageously forthright about the Gudda judgment is that it will dampen
the ardour of a hanging judge reacting to the public clamour for death, revenge
by hanging or any form of legicide. Unfortunately public clamour is becoming an
intense pressure. What Justice Dattu seems to be saying, is: Take a balanced,
non-vindictive stance recognising that life, not death, is the norm.
Justice Dattu's other judgment in Jagat Rai, on the same day, is more elaborate
in elucidating "rarest of rare" parameters for the death penalty.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was a division in the Supreme Court
between the abolitionists (Krishna Iyer, Bhagwati) and retentionists (Thakkar
et.al). The "rarest of rare" formula was the compromise. In Jagat Rai, the
court pointed out that while under the old code (pre 1974) death penalty was
the norm (Section 367(5)), the present code (post 1974) reverses this.
As Jagat Rai surmises: Impose death penalty when any other punishment would not
meet the ends of justice after maximum weightage is given to the mitigating
circumstances in favour of the offender (Machi (1983)?
Balance
So how is the balance sheet between mitigating and aggravating circumstances to
be drawn? Murder itself is not sufficient to pronounce the death penalty. In
Lachma Devi (1985) death as a sentence was characterised as "a barbaric
penalty". The test is: it must be brutal, diabolical, revolting? The truth is
that we don't quite know what this means.
In 1976, AR Blackshield found the sample of Indian cases to be inconsistent. In
2008, the Amnesty Report made a similar conclusion pointing to egregious
blunders in respect of evidence, facts, law and sentencing.
Justice Dattu's sample is also disconcerting. The major test is: does the
murder or offence shock the conscience? Whose conscience? Of the Court? Of the
Court as the trustee of the collective conscience of the community? Or as the
Supreme Court put it in Surja Ram (1997) that after a dispassionate assessment:
"Punishment must also respond to the society's cry for justice against the
criminal."
We are going round in circles. To say that "rarest of rare" means an objective
assessment of what hurts or damages some normative moral notion is based on
guess work rather than brilliance. But to say that the death penalty is a
response to "society's cry for justice against the criminal" is totally
astonishing.
In the 1st instance the issue relates to objectively assessing moral norms. In
the 2nd version, the court is supposed to take on board the actual wishes of
the mob, protest on the streets or the media or in all of them? The 2nd
alternative is simply unacceptable. It is like a Nero putting his thumbs up or
down after hearing the roar of the crowd. It is a social form of lynching.
Either way, the test is unreliable in fact and practice.
But the import of Justice Dattu's judgment that if individual eye-for-eye is
barbaric, so is collective revenge.
Murder
Justice Tarkunde called death penalty a "judicial murder". We might understand
this on a wider scale if we note that 8000 persons in Pakistan and over 1000 in
Bangladesh have been sentenced to death. Suppose it is ordered that all of them
are to be hung at the same time and the same place, would it seem like
genocidal killing even if done away from the public gaze? Does it become less
lethal and more acceptable if the hangings were done over a space of time in
different places?
Judicial murder, state legicide or killing by law in cold blood seems as
precarious as it is wrong. Abolish the death penalty. Try it for 10 years, but
insist a life sentence is a life sentence subject to just prison or sentencing
exceptions. Just try it.
(source: Commentary, Rajeev Dhavan----The writer is a Supreme Court lawyer; The
Dialy Mail)
*********************
Rarest of rare opportunities
Beginning next week, the Supreme Court is expected to consider the pleas of 18
prisoners on death row, whose mercy petitions have all been rejected by the
President of India. The Court has assigned itself a limited mandate: the cases
will be reviewed primarily on the basis of Rashtrapati Bhavan's delay in acting
on the clemency pleas. At the heart of the matter is a classic tussle between
the executive and the judiciary. The Supreme Court, by commuting the death
sentence in some or all cases, will send a strong signal to the government that
its errant treatment of mercy petitions can no longer continue. Already, the
Court has expressed its displeasure at the hasty manner in which Afzal Guru was
executed, without providing his "relatives an opportunity to meet [him] for one
last time." The government in turn will argue the presidential power of pardon
- sanctioned by Article 72 of the Constitution - is beyond the Court's
scrutiny. The stakes are high: how the Court disposes of these pleas could well
determine the fate of A.G. Perarivalan and 2 others convicted in the Rajiv
Gandhi assassination case. The trio were made to wait for a staggering 11 years
before their clemency pleas were considered - and rejected - by then President
Pratibha Patil.
If it institutes a larger bench to hear these pleas, the Supreme Court will
embark on an unprecedented exercise that will reinvigorate the national debate
on the death penalty. Chief Justice P. Sathasivam must be commended for
following through on his call for "authoritative pronouncements" on hangings
and mercy petitions. Beyond the issue of delay, human rights advocates will
doubtless use this platform to highlight how clemency pleas have been turned
down without due consideration. The Court itself has opened the door for this
argument through its decision in Sushil Sharma v. State of N.C.T. of Delhi. If,
as the Court has held, the possibility of reformation is indeed a criterion to
determine if a case falls within the "rarest of the rare" category, is it not
the government's imperative to consider the conduct of death row prisoners?
Nothing can make for a more powerful case to abolish the retributive practice
of death sentences than the reformation of individuals convicted of heinous
crimes. Our prison system is notorious for spawning recidivism. If prisoners
can not only survive a tortuous wait on death row - thanks to government
indecisiveness - but are found to have emerged the better, the Supreme Court
should not hesitate to commute their sentences.
(source: Editorial, The Hindu)
PAKISTAN:
Abolishing death penalty
Much debate has been carried about abolishing the death penalty. The argument
that capital punishment cannot deter the rate of crimes is baseless. Fear of
punishment is indeed one of the most important factors which can reduce the
crime rate. We are often deceived by statistical data indicating that countries
which have abolished the death penalty are doing better than those where it is
yet a ruling. No doubt, it owes to the fact that only death punishment can do
no good in deterring crimes.
Poverty, illiteracy and wrong identification are certainly important factors
which affect the crime rate to a much greater extent. Abolishing death penalty
completely is insane. Yet there is much room for introducing reforms in the
procedure of identifying and the execution of wrongdoers. Above all is to
include a thorough scrutiny and investigation. It is the first step indeed.
After full confirmation of the culprits, there is no harm in executing capital
punishment.
Media, whether print or electronic, has always been on the forefront in
demanding justice for the victims of terrorism, rape, target killings, robbery,
etc. But for the word 'justice', let us 'sit and breathe for sometime in the
shoes of the victims'. No one can better suggest a solution than these poor
lives.
Laraib Ghaffar
(source: Letter to the Editor, Pakistan Observer)
****************************
President, PM help sought for release of prisoners in KSA jails
A media team headed by a senior journalist Manzar Sajad is working to prepare a
list of persons of the area who were facing death penalty in jails of Saudi
Arabia. Manzar Sajad said that so far he had collected data of over 150
Pakistanis including three from Mandi Bahauddin who were awarded death
punishment by Saudi courts on charges of smuggling narcotics. He said these
persons were allured by agents of oversea employment agencies for giving them
lucrative jobs in foreign countries.
He further told relatives of the victims had appealed to Saudi Arabia rulers to
pity on them and releases dear ones on humanitarian grounds.
The victims arranged money after selling their property and paid it to the
agents. The agents after receiving cash referred them to other agents operating
in Islamabad and Rawalpindi for sending them abroad. These agents arranged
their journey by land and air routes and gave them packed parcels for handing
over to their colleagues at destinations. The victims carried these parcels
with them and on destinations were caught by Saudi Arabia law enforcing
agencies that sent them to courts for trial. Manzar said that he met with
relatives of the victims and their co villagers who told that the victims were
innocent persons with unblemished character.
(source: Pakistan Observer)
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