June 30
IRAN----executions
2 prisoners hanged at Rajai Shahr Prison
2 prisoners have been hanged at the Rajai Shahr Prison in Karaj.
According to the report of Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), at least
2 prisoners have been hanged on charge of murder at the Rajai Shahr Prison on
Karaj on Wednesday, June 25th.
1 of them is identified as Mehrdad Bagheri from section 6 and the other man's
name is Benjamin from section 4 of Rajai Shahr Prison.
The state run media has not published any report about these executions yet.
(source: Human Rights Activists News Agency)
UNITED KINGDOM:
Chloe Dewe Mathews's Shot at Dawn: a moving photographic memorial----During the
1st world war hundreds of soldiers, many of them teenage volunteers, were shot
by firing squad for cowardice or desertion. Chloe Dewe Mathews's photographs of
the mostly forgotten sites of their execution provide a poignant memorial of
their tragic fate
James Crozier was 16 when he presented himself at his local army recruiting
office in Belfast in September 1914. He was accompanied by his mother,
Elizabeth, who tried in vain to prevent him enlisting. The recruiting officer,
who also happened to be called Crozier, assured her he would look out for her
son and "would see that no harm comes to him".
Throughout the winter of 1915-16, Private James Crozier fought on the Somme in
the 36th Ulster Division, 9th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles. In early February
1916, he failed to report for sentry duty in the trenches near Serre on the
Western Front. A week later, he was found wandering in a daze some distance
behind the front line. An army doctor examined him and declared him fit in both
mind and body and, on 14 February 1916, he was court-martialled for desertion.
James Crozier defended himself, saying that he had not known what he was doing
when he went absent and had been wracked with pains throughout his body. He was
sentenced to death.
Frank Crozier - the officer who had reassured Crozier's mother - was asked to
supply a recommendation as to whether or not the sentence should be commuted.
He recommended that it should be carried out. On the eve of the execution,
whether out of compassion or guilt, he insisted that the condemned soldier be
plied with drink through the night. As dawn broke on 27 February 1916,
18-year-old Private James Crozier, a boy who had defied his mother to fight for
his country, was carried, unconscious from alcohol, from a holding cell to the
grounds of a commandeered villa nearby. As he was incapable of standing, he was
tied upright to a post and blindfolded.
His officer namesake later recorded the proceedings in his memoirs: "There are
hooks on the post; we always do things thoroughly in the Rifles. He is hooked
on like dead meat in a butcher's shop. His eyes are bandaged - not that it
really matters, for he is already blind."
The firing squad, which was made up of soldiers from James Crozier's own
regiment, shot wide and, after an army doctor confirmed that Crozier was still
alive, an officer drew his revolver and fired a single bullet into the victim's
head. "Life is now extinct," Crozier later concluded in his recollection of the
execution. "We march back to breakfast while the men of a certain company pay
the last tribute at the graveside of an unfortunate comrade. This is war."
Almost 100 years later, at dawn on a freezing December morning in 2013, the
British photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews set up her camera in the grounds of a
French chateau in Mailly-Maillet in Picardy. The resulting photograph is
austere: a tangled bush stands in the middle of a green field which slopes
upwards to bare trees and a grey wintry sky. This ordinary-looking landscape is
imbued with a melancholic power because of what happened there on a cold
February morning in 1916. It is the place where Private James Crozier was
executed.
Dewe Mathews's series Shot at Dawn records many of the sites where around 1,000
British, French and Belgian soldiers were executed for cowardice or desertion
(records of where German soldiers were shot were destroyed during the 2nd world
war). It was commissioned by the Ruskin School of Art at the University of
Oxford as part of a commemorative art series, 14-18 NOW, and will be published
as a book in July and exhibited at Tate Modern in November.
"Initially, I was wary of taking on a project about the first world war as I
have no personal connection with it," says Dewe Mathews, "but, from a
documentary photography perspective, I was drawn to the idea of arriving
somewhere 100 years afterwards. It's almost the opposite of war photography.
So, instead of the photographer bearing witness, it is the landscape that has
witnessed the event and I who am having to go into that landscape in the hope
of finding anything tangibly connected to the event. It was almost like having
to find a new language or way of seeing."
She spent the past 2 years researching the project, meeting war historians and
academics, slowly identifying the places where the executions took place. On
her initial 4-day trip to the 1st world war battlefields in November 2012, she
visited Piet Chielens, the director of the In Flanders Fields museum in Ypres,
Belgium. His area of expertise is the soldiers that were shot at dawn. After
talking to him, Dewe Mathews found the project began to take shape.
"I had studied the 1st world war at school and knew about the terrible
suffering and slaughter, but I had never heard about the executions and so I
was really shocked," she says. "It seemed incredible to me that young men who
had signed up to fight for their country and who were sent out to the trenches
and exposed to this unimaginable horror, should be executed by their own men
because something went wrong in their heads or they simply couldn't do it any
more. From today's perspective and our understanding of soldiers returning from
Iraq or Afghanistan with post-traumatic shock, it just seems brutally unjust."
On several lone trips, Dewe Mathews photographed the places where the
executions were carried out - farmers' fields, woodlands, a primary school, a
slag heap, a former abattoir... She also photographed the cellars and holding
cells where the condemned men spent their last nights alive, one of which - the
prison cell in the town hall of Poperinge, West Flanders - has scrawled
messages still visible on the wall.
Poperinge town hall is rare in that it is one of the few execution sites that
attracts large numbers of visitors on the 1st world war remembrance trail. Most
of these emotionally loaded places have, until now, been lost to history, known
only to locals old enough to remember the stories told about the executions.
Many of the relatives of the executed men are unaware of where exactly they
were killed.
"For a time, some of these places had an almost macabre fascination," says Dewe
Mathews. "One man I met, who was born not long after an execution had happened
in a yard on his family's farm in Loker, West Vlaanderen, told me how the event
had lingered in the local imagination, and cast a kind of shadow over the land
and the family for years afterwards." In that photograph, a solitary tree
stands in a misty field where Privates Joseph Byers, Andrew Evans and George E.
Collins were executed in February 1915.
On another trip, Dewe Mathews visited the local council maintenance office in
Mazingarbe, Nord???Pas-de-Calais, which is situated in a former abbatoir where
11 British soldiers were executed for desertion between December 1915 and March
1918. She was directed there by Madame Dambrine, an elderly lady Dewe Mathews
describes as "a local citizen historian who had researched all the killings and
also told me where the soldiers were buried. At the council offices, though, no
one had any idea of what had happened there."
Dewe Mathews describes her approach as "very slow and thoughtful." She decided
early on to photograph each site at dawn, in keeping with the time that most of
the men were executed, and, as close as possible to the actual date that they
occurred. After a while, she realised that "I was placing my tripod around the
same spot where the firing squad had stood and looking directly at the place
where the victim was placed." It was, she says, "a solitary and sombre
undertaking".
Often Dewe Mathews was told to look for a sloping field or elevated piece of
ground as soldiers were often shot in places where bullets would be embedded in
the earth if they missed the target. One such place was a grim-looking slag
heap officially called Fosse No 4 in Ferfay, Nord???Pas-de-Calais. "Of all the
sites, it was the most depressing and slightly sordid," she says, "while other
places often had an air of melancholy or seemed slightly otherworldly at dawn.
The whole project had a kind of slow, solitary rhythm of its own that was
unlike any other project I have done."
The 23 photographs Dewe Mathews has produced are studies in stillness and
absence. As such, they belong in a documentary-landscape genre that includes
Joel Sternfeld's On This Site and Paul Seawright's Sectarian Murder, both of
which chronicle the ordinary-looking places where extraordinary events have
occurred. As Geoff Dyer notes in his essay for Dewe Mathews's book, her images
may "bear a conceptual resemblance to Sternfeld's, but they are taken within
the already charged zone of memory that is the Western Front. Each is a place
where something happened, enormous and terrible in itself, but easily, perhaps
deliberately, overlooked in the context of the larger cataclysms of the 1st
world war".
James Crozier was one of 306 British or Commonwealth soldiers executed after
being court-martialled for cowardice or desertion during that war. The often
confusing circumstances that led to their courts martial and the ruthlessness
of their punishments only fully came to light with the publication in 1989 of
Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes's history Shot at Dawn. The book listed all
the deaths and, where possible, the events leading up to them. "The predicament
that confronted many of these condemned men was quite pathetic," they wrote.
"Often in poor physical health, these ill-educated, inarticulate individuals
were frequently exhausted from the strains of constant horrific trench warfare
which drained their resolve - and ultimately their lifeblood."
A sustained campaign by relatives of some of the men led to the granting of a
collective pardon on 8 November 2006 and a Shot at Dawn memorial in their
honour now stands in the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Yet
their executions - and the manner in which we should mark them - remain a
contested issue among historians and the military. "It is genuinely difficult
to understand the motives of the pardons campaign," wrote Cathryn Corns and
John Hughes-Wilson in their book, Blindfold and Alone, arguing that there
should only be pardons for those who were suffering from shell shock when they
left their posts, while other soldiers who "were demonstrably guilty" of
desertion "deserved the full rigour of the law by the standards of their time".
Corns and Hughes-Wilson dismissed the campaigners as "shroud wavers" and the
memorial as "a shrine to the unlucky, the shell-shocked and the rogues alike".
But the "rogues", too, had fought for their country in the appalling trenches
of the Western Front. "The stereotypes of the deserter or coward are not always
true and the term 'cunning deserter' is a complete misnomer," insists
Putkowski, an affable and engaging character who has meticulously researched
the individual histories of each executed soldier. "Each incident has a unique
set of circumstances and relatively few men actually ran away from action." In
an essay for Dewe Mathews's book, the historian Hew Strachan defines many of
the victims as "men who were not yet legally adult, because they had enlisted
under age; men who were suffering from what was then called shell shock; men
who genuinely became lost in the confusion of battle; men whose courts martial
were in the hands of officers who lacked legal training and so were not
properly conducted."
For the French, who sentenced more than 600 men to death by firing squad, the
executions were a kind of public theatre, often taking place in wide open
sloping spaces while battalions of up to 2000 men passed by. "The military
logic was brutal and ruthless," says Putkowski. "A public execution was seen as
an example to other soldiers: this man has been executed for desertion and it
will happen to you if you do the same."
GS Chaplin, a military policeman who witnessed the execution at Arras on 31
October 1917, of Private JS Adamson, a 30-year-old soldier in the Cameron
Highlanders, left this stark account in his journal. "Next morning the sun was
shining and a touch of frost was in the air. I was sent up the road to stop any
traffic and high up I had a bird's eye view. I saw the man brought out to the
post, the firing squad march into positions, turn right and take up stand. I
heard the report as they fired and saw the smoke from their rifles. They then
turned and marched off. The officer with revolver in hand inspected the body
then turned away. The dead man was then taken away on a blanket and buried in
the small cemetery in the next field, it was over, I came down but it did not
seem real."
Although between 80 and 90% of British soldiers found guilty of desertion or
cowardice had their sentences commuted, for every soldier found guilty, as
Putkowski puts it, "the human fallout was appalling". He cites the case of Eric
Skeffington Poole, one of the few officers to be executed. A temporary second
lieutenant in the West Yorks, Poole went missing on the day of a battle in
which the regiment lost 225 men. Although the battalion medical officer noted
that Poole's confused state of mind at the time was almost certainly caused by
shell shock, and Brigadier-General Lambert recommended that the sentence be
commuted, Poole was executed at Poperinge on 10 December 1916 on the orders of
Commander-in-Chief, Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who wrote in his diary:
"Such a case is more serious in the case of an officer than a man, and it is
also highly important that all ranks should realise the law is the same for an
officer as a private." Poole was officially registered as having "died of
wounds". Such was the family's distress that they asked for Poole's name to be
omitted from the casualty lists that were given to the press.
For working-class soldiers, the human fallout could be even harsher. One of
those involved in the pardons campaign was Sam Watts, 89, the nephew of Private
William Watts who was shot for desertion on 5 May 1916. In November 2012,
Private Watts was granted 10 days' leave from action but did not return to his
battalion. He was arrested near his home in Liverpool on Christmas Eve, 1915,
and taken to Southampton where he was detained in custody. He managed to escape
and make his way back to Liverpool, where he was arrested again on 6 March.
Watts cited family troubles and produced a doctor's note stating that he was
unfit to return to combat because his lungs were congested owing to gas
poisoning. Although a wayward individual with a record for various petty
misdemeanours including drunkenness and failure to turn up for training, Watts
had acquitted himself well in action in the trenches. During October 1914, more
than half of his battalion had been killed or wounded in heavy fighting. Still,
he was sentenced to death.
Sam Watts's anger about his uncle's treatment is undimmed. "He was a brave
soldier who was executed by his own comrades despite the fact that he was
suffering from shell shock and had been gassed. His pay was stopped the next
day and his wife was left to bring up eight children in the slums of Liverpool.
The stigma was such that she was hounded by the neighbours because he had been
branded as a coward and a deserter by the army. That's how it was in those
days. People did not understand what those men went through and, for decades,
it was never talked about in the family."
When Sam Watts's father returned from the war, "shell-shocked and gassed", and
learned of his brother's execution, he had a mental breakdown and was confined
in Rainhill asylum, where he remained for more 20 years. "He went mute," says
his son. "He didn't speak a word again. When his eldest son was killed serving
in the desert in the 2nd world war, we didn't have the heart to tell him. For
me the pardons campaign was a campaign to end all those years of silence and
shame."
After the collective pardon was granted, Sam Watts attended a service at
Liverpool town hall where William Watts now appears on the memorial list.
Alongside his name, though, are the words "Killed in Action". "What that tells
me," says Sam Watts bitterly, "is that they are still lying about what happened
because they are still ashamed of what they did."
100 years later, it is difficult to reconcile our contemporary understanding of
war and its related traumas with our bafflement at the often ruthless way
armies treated their own men in adherence to contemporary ideals of duty and
discipline. Chloe Dewe Mathews's images, which she has titled simply with the
names of those who were executed and the dates when the executions took place,
are a stark reminder of one of the least-known aspects of the first world war.
They comprise a memorial of sorts to the soldiers shot at dawn, many of whom,
as the historian Richard Holmes wrote, "sometimes found, blindfold and alone,
that courage which had earlier deserted them in circumstances we can hardly
guess at".
The book Chloe Dewe Mathews: Shot at Dawn will be published on 14 July 2014 by
Ivorypress. Chloe Dewe Mathews: Shot at Dawn was commissioned by the Ruskin
School of Art at the University of Oxford as part of 14-18 NOW, WW1 Centenary
Art Commissions. It will be shown as part of the Conflict, Time, Photography
exhibition at Tate Modern, from 26 November.
(source: The Observer)
INDIA:
Juvenile Justice Act: Why lowering the juvenile age limit is no magic bullet
The horrific gang rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student in Delhi in 2012
sent shockwaves across India. 6 men, including a juvenile, were arrested and
charged with sexual assault and murder. Of the 5 adults, 1 died in police
custody (officially suicide but some suspect murder) and the remaining 4 were
sentenced to death by hanging. The juvenile was sentenced to the maximum
sentence possible under Indian law - 3 years in a reform institution.
The Nirbhaya case, as it came to be called in the media, was not the first gang
rape in India, nor has it been the last. Its brutality is not unique either and
yet it caught the nation's attention. There was a public outcry for the death
penalty or even something cruel and unusual. This was further fuelled by the
juvenile sentencing, which in comparison to the adult equivalent, was a mere
slap on the wrist. There was widespread demand to lower the juvenile age limit
from the present 18 to 16 from the public, including prominent people like the
Delhi police commissioner, Karnataka state public prosecutor HS Chandramouli,
and Subramanian Swamy. The ruling Congress Party was also quick to jump on the
bandwagon.
The anger the country felt in the aftermath of the Nirbhaya nightmare is
understandable. However, amending the Juvenile Justice Act is a broader issue
than the Nirbhaya case. Leaving aside discussions on whether lowering the
juvenile age limit will achieve the stated goals and even ignoring the broader
philosophical issues such as the death penalty, the purpose of the justice
system - punishment or rehabilitation - and even the basis of the definition of
'juvenile' - physical or mental - there are legal quandaries in lowering of the
juvenile age limit.
One obstacle to amending the Juvenile Justice Act is the United Nations
Convention on the Rights of the Child, an international treaty India signed and
ratified in December 1992. Although Article 1 of the CRC allows each acceding
state to define the juvenile age limit, Article 37(a) nevertheless stipulates
that "No child shall be subjected to torture or other cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment. Neither capital punishment nor life
imprisonment without possibility of release shall be imposed for offences
committed by persons below 18 years of age."
A 2nd hurdle to reducing the juvenile age limit is the International Convention
on Civil and Political Rights, which India acceded to in April 1979. Article
6(5) of the ICCPR states, "Sentence of death shall not be imposed for crimes
committed by persons below 18 years of age and shall not be carried out on
pregnant women."
As per India's international commitments, it may well lower the juvenile age
limit from 18 to 16 but may not pursue the death penalty or a sentence of life
imprisonment without possibility of parole. Thus, a new category is created
between juvenile and adult. This is not very helpful for Indian bureaucrats who
are considering a waiver of the juvenile age bar only in cases of the most
grievous crimes such as murder, acid attack, rape, and repeat offenders in
cases of robbery, kidnapping, and dacoity. In essence, international law
prohibits the very sentences for which Indian legislators are considering
lowering the juvenile age limit.
India may still withdraw from the treaties or enter into the record certain
exceptions in congruence with new national laws. However, this move is bound to
result in international pressure and greater difficulty in concluding
extradition treaties with other states. For example, European law forbids
extradition in cases where the offence for which extradition is requested
carries the death penalty under the law of the requesting country. Some
countries such as the United States enact automatic sanctions if a country's
human rights ratings fall below a certain level. India narrowly escaped
sanctions over not doing enough to prevent child trafficking in 2011 thanks to
political reasons.
None of this is to argue that the juvenile age limit should not be lowered or
that it should be. In the landmark Roper v. Simmons case in the United States,
the Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment may not be imposed for crimes
committed as minors. The opinion, delivered by Justice Anthony Kennedy,
declared that minors had diminished culpability due to immaturity and therefore
their execution was cruel and unusual under evolving standards of decency. The
opinion also cited significant US legal opinion as well as international
consensus in its favour.
The US Supreme Court did not deny the brutality of some of the crimes committed
by juveniles but made the interesting point that this very factor - the
brutality of the crime - may overpower any mitigating arguments based on youth
as a matter of course if the application of the death penalty was allowed.
However, many question the diminished culpability of juveniles. Setting the age
of adulthood at 18 is arbitrary and is a cultural evolution more than a
scientific one, dictated more by going to college or being drafted for military
service. In a media-saturated age, juveniles today are far more aware than
their predecessors were. However, awareness is not the same as maturity - in
fact, researchers have shown that adolescence can last well into the mid-20s
for many people while some attain a maturity much earlier.
The argument to lower the juvenile age limit in select cases is exactly what
the Roper v. Simmons opinion warned against - the lower age limit is sought
only for some crimes as the public is swayed by an emotional response to their
brutality than by reason alone. If India's legislators genuinely felt that
juveniles today were attaining a certain level of maturity earlier, then why is
the age of adulthood itself not lowered? How is it possible for someone to be
mature enough to commit rape, dacoity, or murder but not to drink, join the
military, or vote?
It is also unclear why the arbitrary juvenile age limit of 18 should now be
moved to the equally arbitrary age limit of 16. Should rapes that have been
committed by boys as young as 15 be forgiven? Or should the limit be lowered
even further? Does India now not recognise childhood, mandating that adult
crimes receive adult punishment? Juvenile crime is indeed becoming more of a
problem in scale as well as intensity but lowering the juvenile age limit is
unlikely to be the magic bullet to solve the problem.
It would indeed be interesting to see the challenge to the international
consensus by India if it were to lower the age of adulthood uniformly. However,
such a move must be informed by reason and debate rather than frustration and
an emotional reaction to cases like Nirbhaya. The problem with doing a
copy-paste job on the structure and workings of government from a 19th century
colonial master is that there is much Indians have not discussed among
themselves.
(source: Jaideep Prabhu is a doctoral student in History at Vanderbilt
University -- Daily news & Analysis)
*****************
Pallavi Purkayastha murder: Watchman convicted, sentencing on Wednesday
Almost 2 years after Mumbai lawyer Pallavi Purkayastha, 25, was killed in her
Wadala flat by a security guard, the main accused, Sajjad Ahmed Moghul was
convicted by a Mumbai court on Monday morning. Sajjad was convicted on charges
of murder, molestation and breaking in.
The quantum of sentence will be given on Wednesday.
Purkayastha's murder on August 9, 2012 had shocked Mumbai. According to the
prosecution's case, Sajjad was reportedly ticked off at her for rebuking him on
a previous occasion. He tripped electricity to her flat and entered when she
called for help.
He took the keys to her flat from a bowl by the entrance door and then let
himself in later, attempting to rape her and then stabbing her fatally.
Her body was found by her boyfriend Avik Sengupta, who died of an illness in
November last year.
"It has been a terrible wait," said Purkayastha's father outside the courtroom
after the judgment was delivered on Monday.
Asked if he expected the death penalty for Sajjad, the father said, "That's the
minimum."
(source: First Post)
******************
Modi govt. want to overturn judicial position on death penalty cases
The newly formed BJP led NDA government in India is planning to challenge the
position taken by the Indian judiciary that undue delay in executions caused by
delay in deciding constitutional review petition by President of India forms
valid ground for granting clemency to a convict.
As per media reports the home ministry of India has conveyed to the ministry of
law that the President's decision on capital punishment should be considered
final after the legal procedure is completed and that the President's decision,
once taken, cannot be challenged in court.
As per media report the law ministry is now preparing to file a curative
petition shortly on behalf of the Central government against the top court
order commuting death sentences of at least 15 convicts, as well in the case
involving commutation of death penalties awarded to former Prime Minister Rajiv
Gandhi's killers to life terms citing an 11-year delay.
"A combined curative petition will be filed in the SC for all the cases where
death sentences have been commuted to life terms despite the President's
rejection of the same," an named top government official was quested by a
report published in Deccan Chronicle (DC).
The MHA, in its draft affidavit sent to the law ministry, is learnt to taken
the view that the President is the "sovereign authority" and once the President
exercises the constitutional powers vested in him under Article 72 and rejects
a constitutional review petition, the court only has limited powers for
judicial review.
The MHA has also taken the view that the government needs to take a tough stand
on "terror-related" cases and other "heinous crimes" falling in the so-termed
"rarest of rare" category and attracting capital punishment.
Such cases, if commuted, do not send out a positive signal, govt. thinks.
Thirdly, the MHA has conveyed to the law ministry that the inordinate delays
being cited on behalf of the government in disposing of petitions by themselves
cannot be sufficient grounds for commuting death sentences. Moreover, since
there is no time frame set for the President to decide on a review plea, there
is no question of delay on the part of the President.
(source: Sikhsiyasat.net)
VIETNAM:
Aussie faces 'cruel' sentence in Vietnam
An Australian man sentenced to death in Vietnam is facing a "cruel" and
"inhumane" end because Vietnam is making its own chemicals for lethal
injections and their efficacy is unknown, Amnesty International says.
Pham Trung Dung, 37, was on Friday sentenced to death for trying to smuggle
more than 4 kilograms of heroin from Ho Chi Minh City to Australia.
He was intercepted by customs at the airport in Vietnam in May last year, state
media reported.
Amnesty campaigner Michael Hayworth says Vietnam carries out its death
sentences in secrecy.
Its parliament legislated a change from the firing squad to lethal injection in
2011, but there was an 18-month break from executions when EU laws prohibited
the import of the chemicals needed for lethal injections, Mr Hayworth says.
Vietnam then began domestic production of the chemicals and broke the hiatus in
August last year.
Between August and December last year, at least 7 people were executed, while
678 remain on death row. Of those, Amnesty says 110 have exhausted all appeals.
Mr Hayworth says it's understood Dung still has avenues for appeal.
"We are hopeful that Vietnam will continue their hiatus and come into line with
the overwhelming global trend to cease this practice," he told AAP.
The state secrecy in Vietnam means campaigners don't know what quantity or
quality of drugs it has to deliver the death sentence, which applies for some
drugs, embezzlement and rape offences.
"We don't know if they properly anaesthetise people or not," Mr Hayworth said.
"Regardless, it remains just as cruel and just as inhumane."
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has reiterated Australia's opposition to the
death penalty, but declined to discuss any diplomatic discussions going on with
the Vietnamese government. She has not said whether Australia has made an
appeal for clemency.
A Vietnamese newspaper reported Dung told his trial he was hired by an
unidentified man to transport the drugs for $40,000.
Dung had been living in Australia with his partner since 2000 and they had
visited Vietnam with their 2 sons to visit family.
(source: Herald Sun)
******************
2 Lao drug traffickers busted in Vietnam
Vietnamese border guards in Nghe An Province on Saturday arrested 2 Lao
nationals suspected of bringing 3.7 kilograms of heroin from Laos to Vietnam.
Xong Rua Lo and Xong Ba Tu (the Vietnamese transcription of their Lao names)
attempted to use knives to attack the border guards, but were overpowered after
a brief fight, according to Nghe An Border Guard Command.
Lo, 28, and Tu, 15, carried 3.7 kilograms of heroin, which they said would be
delivered to drug dealers in Thanh Chuong District. Investigation is on-going,
police said.
Elsewhere on the Vietnamese border with Laos, Vietnamese police are cooperating
with Lao authorities to search for 2 people suspected of transporting 20,000
ecstasy tablets into Vietnam.
The suspects, who travelled in a van, opened fire at the police when they were
stopped in Quang Tri Province in central Vietnam. They then fled to a jungle
that spans two countries, leaving the vehicle and drug behind, police said.
Drug trafficking across the border between Laos and Vietnam is rampant with
scores of dealers and smugglers arrested and convicted every year.
Early this year 30 drug smugglers were sentenced to death in Vietnam for
trafficking more than 12 tons of heroin from Laos through Vietnam and then into
China.
Vietnam's Penal Code rules those convicted of smuggling more than 600 grams of
heroin or more than 2.5 kilograms of methamphetamine face the death penalty,
making the country one of the toughest in the world regarding drug laws.
The production or sale of 100 grams of heroin or 300 grams of other illegal
narcotics is also punishable by death.
(source: Thanh Nien News)
CHINA:
China charges 4 in Kunming attack, sentences 113 on terror crimes
China charged 4 people in connection with a deadly attack at a railway station
in the southwestern city of Kunming in March, state media said on Monday, a
case that helped spur a crackdown on what officials have called an upsurge in
militant violence.
The government has said eight knife-wielding militants from the restive western
region of Xinjiang launched a premeditated attack at Kunming station in Yunnan
province in which 29 people were killed and 140 injured. Police shot four of
the attackers dead.
China's leaders have vowed to strike hard at religious extremists and
separatist groups, which they blame for a series of violent attacks in
Xinjiang, the traditional home of the Muslim Uighur ethnic minority.
"The Kunming Municipal People's Procuratorate found that the suspects were
involved in organising, leading or taking part in the terrorist attack as well
as intentional homicide," the official Xinhua news agency said, citing the
prosecutor.
"The crimes of the 4 defendants are clear and the evidence is abundant," the
prosecutor said.
The Kunming attack was one of the single deadliest incidents attributed by the
government to militants. A suicide bombing in May killed 39 people at a market
in Xinjiang's capital, Urumqi.
Authorities had laid out the charges in March, but have now formally filed
them, paving the way for an imminent trial. The four surviving defendants, all
of whom have Uighur names, are likely to be given the death penalty.
Courts in China are controlled by the ruling Communist Party, making it unusual
for those accused of crimes - particularly in politicised cases - to have a
fair trial.
Xinjiang, resource-rich and strategically located on the borders of central
Asia, is crucial to China's growing energy needs. Analysts say that much of the
proceeds have gone to the majority Han Chinese, stoking resentment among
Uighurs.
Exiled Uighur groups and human rights activists say the government's repressive
policies in Xinjiang, including controls on Islam, have provoked unrest, a
claim Beijing denies.
Courts in Xinjiang had sentenced 113 people to jail terms ranging from 10 years
to life for terrorist activities and other crimes, the Xinjiang government
said.
The sentences were handed down on Wednesday by courts in 11 counties and cities
in the Kashgar region, Xinjiang's official Tianshan news website said late on
Sunday.
It did not identify the ethnicity of those sentenced, but they had Uighur
names.
Those sentenced were accused of crimes such as "being involved in organising,
leading and participating in a terrorist organisation, inciting ethnic hatred
and ethnic discrimination", bigamy, drug trafficking, robbery among other
crimes, the Tianshan news report said.
There is now a "competitive race" among various areas to arrest and sentence
Uighurs, Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress, the largest
group of exiled Uighurs, said in an email.
"Uighurs who have revolted and expressed dissatisfaction against China's
repression are now accused of terrorism," Raxit said.
At least 380 people have been detained in the last month in a sweeping
crackdown on violence in Xinjiang.
State media last month reported a public mass sentencing, reminiscent of
China's revolutionary era rallies, attracting a crowd of 7,000 at a sports
stadium in Yining city in the northern prefecture of Yili.
Around 200 people have died in unrest in Xinjiang in the past year or so, the
government says, including 13 people shot dead by police in an attack on a
police station in mid-June.
(source: The Star)
AUSTRALIA/BRUNEI:
Australia to question Brunei over stoning laws before trade talks
The Australian government will question Brunei over its new criminal law regime
- whose punishments include limb amputation for theft and stoning to death for
adultery or homosexuality - before deciding whether to proceed with trade
negotiations with the tiny, but oil-rich, Sultanate.
The dictatorship on the island of Borneo faces increasing international
hostility over its draconian new laws, and democratic countries are being urged
to break off trade talks in protests.
The United Nations called the laws illegal and inhuman. Amnesty International
says they will send the country "back to the Dark Ages".
Australia is in negotiations to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, of which
Brunei is one of four founding members, along with Chile, New Zealand and
Singapore.
Australia, Japan and the US are among seven Asia-Pacific nations looking to
join the pact.
Completed, the TPP would be one of the biggest free trade agreements in the
world. Joining the TPP would give Australia greater and easier access to
regional markets, the pact aims to set common standards on issues from labour
to intellectual property, and to cut tariffs on traded goods. But critics say
it could compromise environmental protections and allow foreign companies to
sue Australian governments for policies that hurt their profits.
A spokesman for Trade Minister Andrew Robb said the government needed more
information on Brunei???s new laws, before it could decide whether to continue
negotiations.
"Australian officials are seeking clarification on the implementation of this
law from the Bruneian government and until such clarification is forthcoming
any outcome cannot be speculated upon," the spokesman said.
On May 1, the Sultan of Brunei, Haji Hassanal Bolkiah, introduced the 1st of 3
phases in adopting a penal code based on Islamic law, or Sharia.
The 1st phase imposes fines and jail terms for offences such as pregnancy
outside of marriage, failure to perform Friday prayers, and proselytising
religions other than Islam.
The 2nd tranche of laws, to come into force later this year, will punish crimes
such as alcohol consumption or theft with whipping and amputations.
The final phase will impose the death penalty, including by stoning, for
adultery, sodomy, and insulting the Koran or the Prophet Muhammad.
Most of the laws will also apply to non-Muslims. About 78 % of Bruneians are
Muslim, but there are significant Christian and Buddhist minorities.
Sharia courts are common in Muslim majority countries, but in most cases, their
remit extends only to family matters such as marriage and inheritance. Brunei
is the 1st East Asian country to introduce Islamic criminal law.
In the US, the Obama administration is under increasing pressure to abandon the
TPP negotiations because of Brunei.
Recently 119 members of Congress wrote to Secretary of State John Kerry and to
US Trade Ambassador Michael Froman: "Our trade agreements should insist that
participating countries adhere to internationally recognised civil, political
and human rights standards ... we urge you to insist that Brunei address these
human rights violations as a condition before the United States enters into any
trade negotiations."
Mr Robb said this month he expected the TPP agreement to be completed next
year.
"It is probably 80 to 85 per cent there. But of course the end of every trade
agreement is the hard part. So we're into all the market access negotiations. I
can see how this TPP can be concluded but it probably will take until the 1st
half of next year."
Friday marked a global day of protests against Brunei, with demonstrations
outside hotels owned by the Sultan, including the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los
Angeles.
Brunei, a tiny former British protectorate of about 400,000 people, sits
between two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo. It relies on oil and gas
exports for its prosperity, with an annual per capita income of nearly $50,000.
But its economy has faltered in the past year - crude oil exports fell by 1/3 -
and there are concerns for the country's future when already-depleted oil and
gas reserves run out.
The 67-year-old Sultan is one of the richest men in the world. Worth an
estimated $20 billion, he is famous for his lavish lifestyle, grand palaces,
collection of thousands of sports cars, and for reportedly paying Michael
Jackson $17 million to perform at his 50th birthday party.
A spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said
Brunei's new laws were illegal.
"Under international law, stoning people to death constitutes torture or other
cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and is thus clearly
prohibited," Rupert Colville said.
Amnesty International said Brunei's "shocking new penal code will take the
country back to the Dark Ages when it comes to human rights".
Brunei's religious affairs ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
(source: Sydney Morning Herald)
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