May 30
SUDAN:
Sudan husband's hope for wife's death sentence appeal Daniel Wani visited his
children on Wednesday at the prison near Khartoum
The husband of a woman facing the death penalty in Sudan for abandoning her
religious faith has told the BBC he is hopeful an appeal against the sentence
for apostasy will be successful.
Daniel Wani said Meriam Ibrahim was well when saw her on Wednesday a day after
she gave birth in prison.
According to Islamic law, she can nurse her baby daughter for 2 years before
the sentence is carried out.
Born to a Muslim father, she married Mr Wani, a Christian, in 2011.
Sudan has a majority Muslim population. Islamic law has been in force there
since the 1980s.
Jump media playerMedia player helpOut of media player. Press enter to return or
tab to continue.Even though Meriam Yehya Ibrahim Ishag, 27, was brought up as
an Orthodox Christian, the authorities consider her to be a Muslim.
At her trial earlier in May in the capital, Khartoum, the judge also sentenced
her to 100 lashes for adultery because her marriage to a Christian man was not
valid under Islamic law.
Mr Wani, who is a US citizen, said he was delighted to see his new daughter -
and mother and baby were both doing well.
"It's very incredible. I'm so happy," he told the BBC's Newsday programme.
But he said he was most concerned about his 20-month-old son who has been
living with is mother in prison since February.
The judge ruled that Mr Wani was not allowed custody of the boy as the marriage
was not valid.
"His attitude has changed a lot," Mr Wani said of his son.
"He used to be a happy boy. When I went there he just looked at me. No smile,"
he said.
"Sometimes really he is in a bad mood. Every time when I went there, he just
wants to come home with me."
Born in South Sudan before it became independent from Sudan, Mr Wani went to
the US in 1998 at the height of the civil war.
He met Ms Ibrahim in 2011 on a visit to Sudan and they were married at the main
church in Khartoum.
"There is a love story between them," their lawyer Elshareef Ali told the BBC.
Mr Wani, who is in a wheelchair, said he was angry about his wife's
imprisonment.
She had to give birth with heavy chains on her legs, although when he saw her
in the office of the prison her shackles were removed, he said.
Ms Ibrahim was raised as an Orthodox Christian, her mother's religion, because
her father, a Muslim, was reportedly absent during her childhood.
Meriam Yehya Ibrahim Ishag said that as she was brought up a Christian, she had
not committed apostasy
Mr Wani said it was his wife's right to choose her own religion.
"She grew up... with her mother, went to the church and I don't think that
means that she converted from Islam to Christianity."
According to their lawyer, Mr Wani and his wife were first arrested in
September 2013 for adultery - and were allowed out on bail.
The court added the charge of apostasy in February 2014 when Ms Ibrahim said
she was a Christian - and she was taken into custody.
There has been international condemnation of the death sentence.
Correspondents say they are rarely carried out in Sudan.
The sentence to 100 lashes for adultery will reportedly be carried out when she
has recovered from giving birth.
(source: BBC News)
PAKISTAN:
Acts of Divinity
The plight of death-row inmates takes center stage in Lahore.
"It's easy to dismiss someone as a demon or an aberration," says Justice
Project Pakistan's Sarah Belal of death-row inmates. "But most of these cases
are far more complex and require a greater commitment to empathy and
comprehension from society."
To draw out this commitment, Justice Project Pakistan, a nongovernmental
organization based in Lahore that also provides legal services to death-row
inmates, is staging Lorilei at Lahore's Alhamra Arts Center, the Mall. The
1-woman dramatic reading will be performed by Nadia Jamil in English on May 30
and Sania Saeed in Urdu on May 31.
Adapted from Thomas Wright's A Meditation on Loss, which was inspired by the
1994 murder trial of Rick Langley for killing a 6-year-old boy in Louisiana,
the work was brought to Belal's notice by Clive Stafford Smith, who defended
the mentally ill Langley and whose own organization, Reprieve, works closely
with JPP. Lorilei is the story of the 6-year-old's mother and her decision to
drop charges against Langley on grounds of compassion.
"The prosecution argued that forgiving Langley was an unnatural thing and that
she was an unnatural mother," says Belal of the trial 20 years ago. For
speaking against the death penalty, Lorilei was smeared by the prosecution.
"They played up her history of drug addiction because the district-attorney
didn't want to lose the case."
Belal, whose organization represents several mentally ill death-row inmates,
like Langley, says Lorilei is a searing and provocative piece. "The concept of
mental illness is alien in Pakistan," she says. "The state-appointed defense
lawyers don't believe in it unless their clients manifest physical symptoms,
like seizures."
Jamil and Saeed, both mothers, say the title character, Lorilei, is a
challenging one. "If somebody killed my child the way Langley killed hers, I
would want him dead," says Jamil. "I would want vengeance." Lorilei, despite
her loss and shortcomings, was able to journey from wanting vengeance to
showing unyielding compassion. "There is a moment in this process when she just
doesn't want blood on her hands, she wants the killing to stop," says Jamil.
Saeed adds: "Lorilei, despite her ordinariness, through forgiving Langley rises
above everyone else - the jury, the judicial system, her family. She is an
exceptional woman with an exceptional story."
With some 8,000 in the Punjab province alone, Pakistan is home to one of the
largest population of death-row inmates. These include the wrongly accused and
the mentally ill. Pakistani law allows families of murder victims to forgive
the perpetrators. "Our jurisprudence actually recognizes and gives an
opportunity for this incredibly humane and empathetic response," says Belal.
"The journey from vengeance to reconciliation to forgiveness is never easy. It
doesn't happen that often, but it does happen."
(source: Newsweek)
INDIA:
Policemen arrested after gang rape and death of Indian girls; Victims aged 14
and 15 thought to have hanged themselves from tree after assault
Police in northern India have arrested 3 men, including 2 police officers, and
are searching for at least 4 more after 2 teenage girls were found hanged from
the branches of a mango tree after being gang-raped.
A postmortem indicated that the cousins, aged 14 and 15, hanged themselves
after being repeatedly assaulted by a group of men in their village, in the
Budaun district of the huge, poverty-stricken state of Uttar Pradesh.
The social stigma attached to being a rape victim in conservative India
frequently leads to suicides. Earlier reports suggested the victims were
strangled.
The incident provoked angry demonstrations locally and outrage elsewhere in the
country. "It is a gruesome, barbaric act. The whole nation has been up against
this, but every day there is this kind of problem," said Ranjana Kumari,
director of the Centre for Social Research and a women's rights activist.
Disappeared
Indian television channels showed footage of the villagers sitting under the
girls' bodies as they swung in the wind, preventing authorities from taking
them down until the suspects were arrested. The bodies had been found on
Wednesday morning, hours after the 2 teenagers had disappeared from fields near
their home in Katra, 240km from Delhi, police superintendent Atul Saxena said.
Around 1/2 of India's 1.25 billion inhabitants do not have access to a toilet.
Women are vulnerable to assault because they use fields around villages
instead.
Family members named 2 policemen who they said had taken part in the assault
and accused others of refusing to take action when they complained of repeated
harassment of the 2 teenagers. They also accused the head of the local police
station of ignoring a complaint by the girls' father on Tuesday night that they
were missing. He has since been suspended.
"The report suggests antemortem hanging, which means the girls probably
committed suicide," said Mr Saxena.
Death penalty
India tightened its anti-rape laws last year, making gang-rape punishable by
the death penalty. The new laws came after protests over the fatal gang-rape of
a 23-year-old woman on a moving bus in New Delhi in December 2012.
That incident led to an unprecedented national debate and to calls for
widespread changes in cultural attitudes as well as policing and legal reform.
Records show rising incidences of rape in India. Activists say the true number
of assaults is higher than suggested by official records because of an
entrenched culture of tolerance for sexual violence, which leads many cases to
go unreported, and the social stigma which victims suffer.
Last month, the head of Uttar Pradesh's governing party told an election rally
that he opposed the law calling for gang-rapists to be executed. "Boys will be
boys. They make mistakes," said Mulayam Singh Yadav, who is also the father of
the state's chief minister.
(source: Irish Times)
RUSSIA:
Top investigator wants to restore death penalty 'as preventive measure'
The head of Russia's Investigative Committee has asked MPs to consider the
return of capital punishment in Russian law, but noted he wasn't seeking actual
executions, but the psychological effect that such a threat could have on
potential criminals.
"The topic of execution is currently a taboo in our country," Aleksandr
Bastrykin told a group of MPs he had invited for a conference in his office. "I
am not suggesting to restore the actual death penalty, but I think that it must
be present in our legislation as the hypothetical possibility of such an
outcome can stop a potential criminal," he added.
The death penalty is currently present in the Russian Criminal Code, but
legislators introduced a moratorium on it in 1997, when the country signed the
Convention on Human Rights and Freedoms, a necessary step for entering the
Council of Europe.
However, some politicians and law enforcers have repeatedly called for the
return of capital punishment, especially in response to heinous crimes and
large-scale terrorist attacks. In February last year, Interior Minister
Vladimir Kolokoltsev said that it would be "society's normal reaction" as he
was commenting on the brutal murders of 2 small girls. The top Russian
policeman stressed that this was his personal opinion.
Kolokoltsev's words prompted comments from top officials, who assured the
public that there were no plans to reintroduce the death penalty. Vladimir
Putin's press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, said the president's position on the
issue is established, fixed and consistent, adding that in his view Putin was
more in favor of a total abolition of the death penalty.
Lower House Speaker Sergey Naryshkin told reporters that he was against the
return of capital punishment and the press service of the Prosecutor General's
Office noted that Russia had obligations to the Council of Europe and therefore
the moratorium would remain.
According to a poll conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation in September
2013, 68 % of Russians thought that death sentences were acceptable in
principle, while 24 % answered that the measure was totally inadmissible.
According to the same poll, 91 % of citizens described suicide as completely
unacceptable, and 34 % said the same about medically-assisted euthanasia.
The head of the International Institute of Political Expertize think tank,
Yevgeniy Minchenko, told the Kommersant daily this week that he considered the
return of the death penalty was a possibility, as the moratorium was introduced
in order to please Europe and today most Russians no longer want to heed
European opinion.
The government representative in the Supreme, Constitutional and the Supreme
Arbitration Courts, Mikhail Barshevskiy, told the RBC news agency that as a
lawyer he could not understand Bastrykin's position. "If he wants it to be
applied, this is impossible because of the Constitutional Court ruling, if he
wants it to be present in the criminal code - it is there already," the agency
quoted the lawyer as saying.
(source: rt.com)
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