Feb. 16
CANADA:
Canada defends its principles on death penalty abroad
The Liberal government has signalled a major shift on seeking clemency for
Canadians facing the death penalty abroad. Clemency will be sought "in each and
every case, no exceptions," says Global Affairs Minister Stephane Dion, and not
selectively as has been the practice since 2007.
Ronald Smith, facing execution in Montana, got no support for his clemency plea
in the United States from then-prime minister Stephen Harper, who said such
backing would send the "wrong signal." The Federal Court disagreed; in 2009, it
forced the government to ask for clemency, which it grudgingly did.
Amnesty International believes only 2 Canadians are currently at risk of being
executed abroad, both in the United States. (The federal government refuses to
release numbers). But a few others in the Middle East did face this risk, and
have since been freed or had sentences commuted.
Dion says the death penalty "is not something that should be done in a
civilized society." Supporting Canadian clemency requests abroad is a
clear-sighted ethical stance from a government still defining its foreign
policy. We may not have the largest clout on the world stage, but it???s worth
declaring our principles clearly - and acting on them. Bravo.
(source: Editorial, Ottawa Citizen)
IRAN:
Ahwazi: Iran Carrying Out Wave of Executions
Hassan Rouhani's presidency has seen Iran's human rights record deteriorate
markedly, especially with regards to the Ahwazi community. Human rights
activists and intellectuals in particular are victims of a persistent and
ruthless crackdown. They are illegally detained, face grossly unfair trials -
often on spurious charges of "enmity to God" - and are then often sentenced to
death and executed.
Below is an article published by Countercurrents:
The human rights situation has been worsening quickly in Iran. More than 2,000
people have been hung during Hassan Rouhani's tenure as President of the
regime. This is the biggest scale of executions in the past 25 years. These
mass executions will be added to the black pages of the Iranian regime's
history of human rights violations since the Iranian revolution in 1979. The
large-scale execution of political and ideological prisoners has resulted in
Iran being named one of the top countries committing executions per capita
during the past few years.
Unlocked from its sanction-based constrictions, Iran is now fully free to
underwrite terror and carry out more executions against Ahwazi Arab and
throughout the country. 5 Ahwazi are facing imminent execution in public. The
names of these Ahwazi Arab prisoners are Qais Obeidawi, Hamood Obeidawi,
Mohammad Helfi, Mehdi Moarabi and Mehdi Sayahi.
The 5 men were condemned following a trial filled with heinous violations of
the judiciary process by the Revolutionary Court of mullahs in Iran. These
prisoners were arrested in April 2015 and on Tuesday, June 16, 2015, were
brought in front of television cameras of Press TV by the Ministry of
Information to make public confessions about their fictional crimes. Farhad
Afsharnya, the regime's supposed Chief Justice for the Al-Ahwaz region said the
execution of the 5 Arabs was confirmed, it will be ratified by the court and
execution will be carried out in public.
These Ahwazi activists were only concerned with advancing cultural and social
awareness for the cause of Ahwaz people and were not connected to an armed
struggle against the state. The Iranian regime has stepped up its ferocious
crackdown against Ahwazis and all none-Persian activists after the tension
between Iran and its neighbours heightened as a result of Iran's involvement in
Middle Eastern wars, such as in Syria and Yemen. Similar sentences which have
been issued in closed rather than public court proceedings, give substantial
reason to conclude that the Iranian judicial system only pays lip service to
any idea of due process. Furthermore, it becomes apparent that human rights are
overlooked by any president while the judicial system is not independent. These
executions might occur anytime soon after the Iranian parliamentary election at
the end of February [2016].
The Iranian regime's massive hypocrisy in condemning Saudi Arabia's
questionable human rights record is breathtaking. Any use of the term
"moderate" in connection with Iran's president Hassan Rouhani is ludicrous
hyperbole; he is simply the president elected from the list of candidates
chosen for the position by the Guardian Council, consisting of 12 Islamic
theologians and jurists, according to the Iranian Constitution.
Under the constitution, secular candidates or those who fail to embrace the
Islamic Republic's theocratic hardline Shiite values are nominally capable of
being selected but, in reality, are not.
The parliament or Masjid has little power over the regime's religious courts to
stop or even slow down the rate of executions, with the courts routinely
issuing verdicts without even hearing evidence or investigating the charges
against accused individuals as might be expected under legal systems elsewhere
in the world.
One example of the Iranian regime's legal system is the common charge of
muharebeh or 'enmity to God,' routinely used against human rights activists and
dissidents, which invariably receive the death penalty, often administered in
public by stoning or mass hangings by cranes. Many of those hanged take up to
20 minutes to die slowly and painfully of strangulation. The victims' bodies
are left for some time before being removed as a way of intimidating the public
into silence.
Since Hassan Rouhani took office in 2013, over 2,000 Iranians, including women,
many of them Ahwazi Arabs, Kurdish and Baluchi Sunnis, have been executed,
almost all after ludicrous kangaroo trials in which they were unrepresented and
not allowed to submit any evidence in their defence. Recently, 6 of 33 Sunni
men currently on death row were publicly executed in a mass hanging, while
another woman was sentenced to death by stoning. This is the "moderate" Iranian
regime.
This report sheds light on this failure of the Iranian regime to respect the
rights of the Ahwazi Arab people in Al-Ahwaz, the South and South-Western part
of Iran.
Conducted behind closed doors, before biased judges and in the absence of legal
representation, the unfair trials of Arabs in the Al-Ahwaz region are part of a
long-standing persecution of this oppressed people in Iran.
Despite the fact that this recurring miscarriage of justice is in flagrant
violation of the Islamic Republic's constitution, Iran's jails are filled with
Ahwazi political prisoners who face brutal punishments, a lifetime in prison or
execution.
Over the past decade, hundreds of Ahwazi Arab prisoners ranging from poets,
teachers to bloggers and human rights activists have been executed on trumped
up charges in kangaroo courts.
Rather than finding reasonable evidence for the commission of a crime, judges
generally rely on confessions, which have been drawn out from the accused
through physical torture and psychological duress. Meanwhile, friends and
relatives of the accused are kept in the dark, often not informed of where
their loved one has been imprisoned, or even buried.
As we follow carefully the history of Ahwazi Arab people of repression,
violence and capital punishment, we see that they have a long record of
systematic crackdown over decades.
Meanwhile, the execution of Ahwazi intellectuals historically has inflicted an
irreversible blow to the liberty movement of this occupied nation that has been
struggling to achieve its fundamental rights of self-determination for years.
The executions of early leaders of the Ahwaz liberation movement in 1963, the
oppressive policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran against Ahwazi people in
every phases of their life, the tragic bloody massacre of Mohammareh in 1979,
and the severe crackdown of popular uprising in 2005 provide ample evidence
that intellectuals, Ahwazi public figures, and the political class of this
nation repeatedly have been targeted for imprisonment, repression and
execution.
The largest popular uprising of Ahwazi people broke out on 9 April 2005 when
people from several cities turned out into the streets and protested against
the distribution of a circular (petition) attributed to Mohammad Ali Abtahi,
former Vice President for Parliamentary and Legal Affairs of President Mohammad
Ali Khatami.
The latter events of popular uprising in April 2005 in Ahwaz, which was a
non-violent demonstration against the wicked policy of the central government
focusing on altering the demography of Ahwazi Arab people, reminded the nation
of the catastrophic massacre when so many people were killed in the course of
the widespread peaceful demonstration, so many people massacred in the street
by Iranian squad riot forces.
At the time, many civil and cultural activists were executed and many
clean-handed and innocent young protesters were killed under torture, their
bodies discovered in Karoon River. These bodies were wrapped up in plastic and
their hands were tied up behind their backs with rope. After the massacre,
terrible panic and a suffocating climate dominated the region and subsequently,
the executions of highly educated, intellectuals, and civil and political
activists started again.
Notably, in 2005, dozens of teachers and cultural activists were arrested and
after unfair trials and without access to legal representation, they were
charged with vague charges, such as acting against the national security,
enmity with God, corrupting the earth and blasphemy, and then condemned to
execution or life imprisonment. As an example, Mr. Zamell Bawi, who was
studying law at senior semester at university and was waiting for his
graduation ceremony, was arrested by intelligence security and under physical
and psychological tortures was forced to incriminate himself falsely.
After a show trial in a revolutionary court in Ahwaz he was sentenced to death
and his verdict confirmed by the higher tribunal in Tehran. Additionally, 6
immediate members of his family who were mostly students and cultural
activists, were sentenced to life imprisonment and exiled to far- away prisons
outside Ahwaz.
In 2005, Ali Ouda Afravi , Mehdi Hantoush Navaseri, in 2006, Ali Matori, Malik
al-Tamimi, Abdullah Soleimani (Kaabi), Abdul Amir Faraj Allah, Mohammad Lazem
Kaab, Khalaf DhrabKhazraei , Ali Reza Asakereh, in 2007, Qasem Salamat, Majed
Albughbish, Razi Zargani, Raisan Sawari, Abdolreza Hantoush Navaseri, Muhammed
Ali Sawari, Jaafar Sawari, in 2008, Hussein Asakereh, Abdul Hussein Al-Hareibi,
Ahmad Meramzy, Zamell Bawi, and in 2009, Khalil Kaabi and Said Sadon were
sentenced to death on false charges of "enmity against God", and after months
of torture in solitary confinement in secret prisons were secretly hanged. It
is noteworthy that all these executed people were the educated and the
political and cultural activists of the Ahwaz nation and the bodies of these
people had not been handed over to their families.
Hashem Shabani, an Ahwazi Arab poet and human rights activist was executed for
being an "enemy of God" and threatening national security. In reality, he spoke
about the brutal treatment of Ahwazi Arabs, while he was campaigning for the
Ahwazi people who are oppressed, mocked and treated as 3rd citizens by
Iranians. We have to keep in mind that if somebody is an Arab, then they are
not the same as being an Iranian Persian because of their ethnic background.
There is a cultural bias against Ahwazi Arabs in the mainstream Persian
population.
In 2011, the brothers Heydariyan (3 people) along with their friend, Ali
Sharifi, were arrested in the wake of civil protests in Ahwaz. According to
credible reports, they were charged with enmity with God and were sentenced to
death after confessing under torture. They were denied a fair trial and
judicial proceedings and in 2012 were hanged in secret. Ali Chbyshat and Khalid
Mousavi were arrested in 2011 and were kept for seven months in solitary
confinement by the Intelligence Service without access to lawyers and then
convicted to death penalty and hanged in secret.
Because of the severe repression, censorship, lack of freedom of the press and
the judicial system's lack of transparency and lack of coverage for any of the
non-Persian prisoners, there is no possible way to give exact figures of all
the death sentences among non-Persian ethnic groups in Iran. Iran not only has
the world's highest execution rates but the executions have mostly been carried
out against ethnic groups such as Ahwazis, Kurds and Baluchis who are
struggling to achieve their national and linguistic identity and
self-determination rights.
There are thousands of underage prisoners who have been executed in Iran.
According to the International Covenants on Human Rights, the death penalty is
forbidden for people who commit crimes while younger than eighteen years of
age. "Waging war against God" is one of the leading charges used by the Iranian
regime to justify the inhuman executions of ethnic groups in Iran.
Since the 1980s, the clerical regime used it as a weapon to suppress many
political and ideological opponents. Most executions of prisoners who were
accused of "enmity against God" belong to non-Persian ethnic nationalities in
Iran, mostly Ahwazi Arab, Baluch, and Kurdish activists.
The regime defies international law by holding all the bodies of the executed
prisoners. Hundreds of Ahwazi prisoners' bodies have been withheld by the
Iranian authorities. Many human rights organisations called on the regime to
hand over the bodies of the executed political prisoners to their anguished
families.
This is a part of the regime's collective punishment policy against the Ahwazi
Arab people. Iran has refused to deliver the bodies of hundreds of Ahwazis
executed since 2005 to date under the pretext that their families will hold
funerals for them, which will serve as a catalyst for Ahwazi uprising. This
reflects the racism of the Iranian regime against Ahwazi Arabs.
Finally, one must question the purpose of the regime behind the high number of
executions and the human tragedies. In a country where most of fraud and
administrative and financial corruption are committed by regime officials,
while the oppressed nations are living in extreme poverty, why is it that these
officials have not been prosecuted or executed?
It can be concluded that the executions of non-Persian prisoners have political
and security aspects in a bid of the ruling regime in Iran to expand its
domination and control over the occupied and oppressed nations of Ahwaz,
Kurdistan, Baluchistan and other peoples in the country.
When the Iranian regime learned that its agenda has been failed to put out the
peaceful resistance of Ahwazi people, the Iranian authorities with the help of
their deeply flawed criminal justice system began to prioritize the death
penalty of Ahwazi prisoners, amid warnings from human rights organizations,
such as Amnesty International.
Since the Ahwazi uprising, the death sentences and executions are being imposed
and carried out on Ahwazi prisoners even more extensively, after procedures
that violate human rights standards.
Iranian television stations like Press TV continue to broadcast
self-incriminating testimonies of Ahwazi detainees even before the opening of a
trial, undermining the fundamental rights of defendants to be considered
innocent until proven guilty.
Is it just Ahwazi political prisoners who must be executed for using their
pens, the only weapons they raised in the struggle for the rights of the Ahwazi
people? Why is it a crime in the Iranian state to write about the lack of basic
rights to a decent existence for the Ahwazi people who live below the poverty
line, while their land is teeming with natural resources such as oil, natural
gas, mining stone and running water? All remain inaccessible to the people of
Ahwaz, including the right to clean drinking water.
Where is the justice when the Ahwaz region, the so-called heart of Iran's
economy, is considered one of the poorest regions in Iran?
From 2003 to date, the climate in Ahwaz has dramatically deteriorated due to
air pollution caused by Iran's industrial activities in Ahwaz. Ahwaz is one of
the most polluted areas in Iran and the larger Middle East, and it is an area
where there is a visible increase in the number of people dying from
pollution-related diseases.
One has only to visit the out-patient department in hospitals in the Ahwaz to
find them filled with patients suffering from cancer and other
pollution-related chronic lung diseases. If our political prisoners have
established campaigns, it is only because they could not close their eyes and
remain silent regarding the horrific sufferings of their people.
The world is learning slowly that Ahwazi political prisoners are quickly
sentenced to death after unjust show-trials where they are charged with "enmity
against God", or that they post a risk to national security, or militant
activities and secession. The vast majority of Iranians, the pro-Iranian Mullah
regime who view themselves as human rights advocates who claim to be distraught
over the rivers of blood flowing in Syria and other Arab nations are weeping
crocodile tears if they're honest, having remained silent for decades on the
plight of the Ahwazi Arab peoples and other brutally oppressed ethnic groups in
Iran who are murderously subjugated and brutalised solely for claiming their
lawful rights.
Iran, by dominating on the wealth of this nation, has increasingly plundered it
and as a result of it, the villages and towns of Al-Ahwaz were destroyed day by
day. The chauvinist policies of Iranian governments have had to try to
completely deny the existence of Ahwazis. In return, when Ahwazis protest at
the ongoing oppression, they will be dealt with live fire or arrest and then
execution. It seems that the execution sentence is Iran's last resort to
liquidating Ahwazi prisoners.
(source: Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization)
PAKISTAN:
SC seeks record of accused convicted by military courts
The Supreme Court on Tuesday maintained its earlier stay order against death
penalty of four criminals given by military courts and sought the whole record
of the proceedings.
The 2-member apex court bench comprising Justice Dost Muhammad and Justice Qazi
Faez Isa heard the pleas filed by the 4 accused against their conviction by the
military courts.
Accused Ali Rehman and Taj Muhammad were convicted by a military court for
financing terrorists, who attacked Army Public School Peshawar, Qari Muhamamd
Zubair for attacking a mosque in Noshewara, and Imarn for killing army
personnel and civilians in Bajour Agency.
Their pleas against the military courts' verdicts were rejected by the Peshawar
High Court (PHC) and they had moved the apex court.
During course of proceedings, Col Jamsheed appeared before the court and stated
that Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Raheel Sharif had dismissed the mercy
appeals of the convicts and their death warrants were issued after the
signature of COAS.
Attorney General Salman Aslam Butt submitted the record of the case. The bench
objected on the record, saying it had sought the record of trial courts, which
was missing.
Later, the court sought the record and adjourned the case for an indefinite
time.
(source: Business Recorder)
JAPAN----film review
Death by Hanging
The documentary-esque opening of Nagisa Oshima's Death by Hanging calmly
establishes an execution chamber and its efficiency in such a way as to tempt
the audience to accept, even admire, the dispassionate letter of the law. Shots
gently travel down bare corridors and take in waiting cells and Buddhist
altars, giving the chamber's spartan layout a facade of honor and respect. It's
only when one blindfolded prisoner is led to the gallows trembling in fear that
the detached mood wavers, and Oshima includes a thoroughly chilling shot that
idly traces the path of the rope from the dangling noose up to the ceiling,
then diagonally down to where the rest of the length has been pulled taut and
tied off. Everything leading up to that shot could have made its way into a
state-approved feature on the legality of execution, but the protracted gaze on
the method of killing imparts such great, disturbing power to the noose that
the full truth of the death penalty can no longer be viewed in abstract terms
of justice.
This moment of clarity leads immediately into the hanging of the condemned, a
Korean-Japanese man named R (Do-yun Yu). Having set up the efficiency of
capital punishment, the film loses its straightforward momentum when the
prisoner doesn't die and is merely rendered unconscious. The staff around him
are so shocked that they immediately begin to debate what to do next. Most
favor simply putting R right back into the noose and finishing the job, but one
officer notes that they cannot hang an unconscious man. "The prisoner's
awareness of his own guilt is what gives execution its moral and ethical
meaning," he says before hastily adding, "Though I'm no authority."
With this fastidious attention to self-justification, the film pivots abruptly
from a social-realist message movie to a grim satire. The prison staff works to
"heal" the man so that he can be fit to execute, though they must contend not
only with R's physical health, but his capacity to remember, and thus regret,
his crimes. This leads to farcical reenactments of those violations by the
prison staff, charades led by the prison's sniveling bureaucrat of an education
officer (Fumio Watanabe), who attempts to jog R's memory like a kindly teacher
trying to get a dim pupil to understand the most basic of concepts. The
exercise gradually implicates the staff to the point that they're visited by
what appears to be the ghost of a woman who confirms R's guilt, but viciously
condemns the death penalty. The ghost's debate with the officers is the
pinnacle of the film's dark farce, but the gentle empathy she feels for the
prisoner also points toward the somber self-examination of the final act.
Though the film focuses on capital punishment in general, its moral conflict
also extends to R's ethnicity and how that affects his place in Japanese
society. Early in the film, the staff act out R's childhood with racist
stereotypes and a concocted narrative that suggests he would always grow up to
be a savage. But their racism unwittingly implies that if R's youth set him up
for failure, it could be the result of such condescending, dismissive treatment
by Japanese authority and society as much, if not more so, than personal flaws.
The ghost, who herself claims to be Korean, corroborates this, gently
commiserating with the condemned for their shared torment.
If Oshima sees the death penalty in general as wrong, his understanding of the
disproportionality of it truly rages at Japanese hypocrisy, especially given
the still-recent history of the nation's treatment of the peninsula during
World War II. Near the end of the film, which is otherwise shot in neutral
grays, R walks past a Japanese flag on the wall rendered in high contrast,
framing it as a blazing, white void pockmarked by a black hole. It is an
obliterative image, one that uses the symbol of a nation to consume it whole,
and it summarizes the film's rage and disgust better than any speech.
Image/Sound
The film's low-contrast cinematography places emphasis on the atmospheric
pallor of the execution chamber, as well as the story's moral torpor, and
Criterion's restored transfer clearly differentiates between the many shades of
gray. The intentional flatness of the images doesn't preclude healthy textures
maintained by preserved grain; close-ups, which increasingly dominate the
second half of the film, show great detail. The lossless mono track faithfully
renders the audio, which consists largely of dialogue, but occasionally
broadens to include more subtle additions, like the sound of a heartbeat as R
fails to die as expected at the start of the film.
Extras
The Blu-ray comes with Nagisa Oshima's 1965 short documentary Diary of Yunbogi,
a frank depiction of the Korean-Japanese tensions that are explored more
abstractly in Death by Hanging. The disc also includes a half-hour interview
with Tony Rayns, who discusses Oshima's career in general overview. Rayns's
most valuable contributions consist of the ample social context he gives for
the director's ever-changing style. Finally, there's a theatrical trailer, as
well as a leaflet with a brief introduction written by the director in 1968,
and an essay by Howard Hampton that places the film within the context of
Oshima's radical '60s period and its Godardian mixture of genre deconstruction
and politics.
Overall
Nagisa Oshima's satire on capital punishment and its racist application has
lost none of its relevance, and its punkish fury is excellently served by
Criterion's gorgeous Blu-ray.
(source: Slant Magazine)
BELARUS:
Belarus sentences triple murderer to death
Belarus on Tuesday sentenced to death a man convicted of killing 3 people, the
day after the European Union (EU) announced it was lifting sanctions against
the ex-Soviet country for an improved human rights record.
It was the 3rd death penalty handed down in Belarus since November 2015.
The 32-year-old man, whose name was not released, was sentenced by a court in
Minsk which had found him guilty of 5 crimes including the 3 murders, announced
Yulia Liaskova, spokeswoman for the Belarusian high court.
These crimes were "committed with particular cruelty," she said.
The 2 other recent death sentence cases in Belarus were in January when Gennadi
Yakovitsky, 49, was convicted of killing his companion and in November, when
Ivan Kulesh, 29, was found guilty of killing 3 saleswomen.
The latest death sentence came after EU foreign ministers agreed Monday to lift
nearly all sanctions on Belarus, including against strongman President
Alexander Lukashenko, after improvements in the country's human rights record.
EU foreign affairs head Federica Mogherini said that Belarus was "showing a
positive trend which we want to encourage."
At the same time the European Union is opposed to capital punishment and
abolishing the death penalty is a pre-condition for a country becoming a member
of the bloc.
More than 400 people have been condemned to death in Belarus since the 1990s,
according to estimates by human rights groups.
(source: Agence France-Presse)
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