April 6
GLOBAL:
Countries that execute on wrong side of history
Aftab Bahadur was 15 years old when a Pakistani court found him guilty of
killing 3 people and sentenced him to death.
His sentence followed a farcical trial. Bahadur had always maintained his
innocence and said he was tortured into a "confession." His co-accused Ghulam
Mustafa, who falsely implicated him during the trial, later retracted his
statement, admitting that police had beaten him.
On June 10 of last year, after almost 24 agonizing years on death row, Bahadur
drew his last breath as he was hanged in a jail in Lahore. He had been dragged
to the gallows a handful of times before and saved at the last minute, but not
this time.
"We start to count down (to our execution), which itself is painful and
nerve-racking. In fact, we die many times before our death. In my personal
experience, nothing is more dreadful than waiting to die," he told media just
months before his killing.
Bahadur was 1 of 326 people executed in Pakistan last year. The country lifted
a moratorium on civilian executions in December 2014 after the horrific
Taliban-led massacre at a school in Peshawar. The move was ostensibly to
"tackle terrorism," even though there is no evidence that the death penalty is
more of a deterrent to crime than other forms of punishment.
The sheer number of people executed in Pakistan is staggering: 326 is the
highest figure Amnesty International has ever recorded in the country in a
single year since beginning to monitor executions there in 1980. Sadly, as we
release our annual report on the death penalty worldwide on Wednesday, Pakistan
is not the only source of troubling developments.
Both Iran and Saudi Arabia also saw huge surges in the number of people put to
death by the state. In Iran, at least 977 people were executed -- an increase
of more than 200 on the year before. The vast majority had been convicted of
drug-related crimes. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, put at least 158 people to death.
This is an incredible 76% rise on the year before, and the highest number we
have recorded for the country since the early 1990s.
These 3 countries -- Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- were the main culprits
behind an alarming and staggering rise in global executions last year. In
total, at least 1,634 people were put to death around the world, the highest
judicial death toll we have recorded in more than a quarter-century.
This global total, however, does not even include China, where Amnesty
International believes thousands of people are put to death every year. But
Chinese authorities treat death penalty statistics as state secrets, meaning
that the true figure is impossible to determine.
As an organization that for decades has campaigned for an end to the death
penalty, last year's setbacks were as disturbing as they were dismaying. Apart
from the number of lives taken, the use of the death penalty is in many
countries riddled with serious problems: unfair trials, the use of torture to
extract "confessions," death sentences for juvenile offenders and a lack of
transparency, to name a few.
But thankfully, 2015 was not all bad news. It was, in fact, in many ways a year
of extremes, with stark developments on both ends of the spectrum. The 25
countries around the world that carried out executions belong to an isolated
minority. In fact, Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia accounted for almost 90% of
all global executions (excluding China).
Last year, we also saw a record number of countries fully remove the death
penalty from their legal books. Four states in total -- Fiji, Madagascar,
Republic of Congo and Suriname -- abolished the death penalty for all crimes in
2015, and a new penal code in Mongolia means it will also join the abolitionist
ranks in 2016.
For the 1st time ever, the majority of the world's countries now have legal
frameworks that make no mention of the death penalty at all. In total, 140 of
the world's countries have fully abolished capital punishment in law or
practice.
A historical perspective makes the long-term global trend away from the death
penalty even starker. Although 25 countries executed last year, two decades
ago, in 1996, that figure stood at 39. In 1945, when the United Nations was
established, only eight countries had abolished the death penalty for all
crimes. Today, this number stands at 102 countries, with more on the cusp of
doing so.
Countries that still execute need to realize that they are on the wrong side of
history and immediately impose moratoriums on the death penalty with a view to
its eventual repeal.
The hundreds of people put to death in Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and
elsewhere in 2015 will never come back, but authorities in those countries can
at least ensure that no more lives are lost in the name of "justice."
(source: Opinion; Salil Shetty is secretary general of Amnesty
International----CNN)
BANGLADESH:
SC upholds JMB man's death penalty
The Appellate Division on Wednesday upheld the death sentence of Masumur Rahman
alias Masum, a member of the banned militant outfit Jama???atul Mujahideen
Bangladesh (JMB), in a case over bomb blast at Laxmipur Judge Court.
A 4-member bench of the Appellate Division, led by chief justice SK Sinha,
passed the order, reports UNB news agency.
Besides, the SC scrapped the High Court judgment that had acquitted condemned
convict Mohammad Amzad Ali, another JMB man, and ordered Amzad's retrial.
The SC also asked the authorities concerned to shift Amzad Ali to general cell
from the condemn cell of the jail.
Lawyer Delwar Hossain stood for Masum while deputy attorney general Shashank
Shekhor Sarkar represented the state.
According to the prosecution, miscreants carried out the bomb attack on
Laxmipur district Judge Court during working hours on 3 October 2005.
Majibullah, a litigant, was killed and several other people, including Judge MA
Sufian and bench officer Shafiqullah, were injured in the bomb blast.
Later, a case was filed against JMB member Masumur Rahman alias Masum in this
connection.
On 15 August 2006, Laxmipur Speedy Trial Tribunal sentenced three JMB
men-Masum, Ataur Rahman Sunny and Amzad Ali-to death in 2 cases.
Later, the convicts filed an appeal with the High Court against the tribunal
verdict.
After hearing, an HC bench upheld the death sentence of Masum while acquitted
Amzad Ali in the case in 2013.
Later, the state filed an appeal with the Supreme Court against the verdict and
the convicts filed petitions seeking acquittal.
(source: Prothom Alo)
AFRICA:
No more death penalty? Reforms in Africa fuel drop in world execution laws.
For the 1st time, the death penalty became illegal in more than 1/2 the world
in 2015. That shift comes in large part due to changes in sub-Saharan Africa.
There was little global fanfare last year when 2 small African states -
Madagascar and Congo Brazzaville - announced that they had outlawed the death
penalty.
On the surface, the legal change in both countries appeared little more than
cosmetic - neither had carried out an execution in more than 30 years, a far
cry from from places like China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan that execute
hundreds of criminals every year. But beneath the global radar, Madagascar and
Congo had helped put a thumb on the scales of history.
In 2015, for the first time ever, the death penalty was illegal in more than
1/2 the world's countries, according to a report released today by Amnesty
International. In addition to the 2 African countries, the states that tipped
the balance were Fiji, Suriname, and Mongolia. They are all part of a dramatic
global shift away from capital punishment over the last 2 decades, which has
seen the number of states where the practice is entirely illegal nearly double,
from 60 to 102.
And perhaps in no region has this transformation been more significant than
sub-Saharan Africa, where abolishing the death penalty has been part of a
broader movement in many countries to close the door on colonial-era laws -
including those criminalizing everything from homelessness to homosexuality -
developed for a world order that no longer exists.
"The death penalty in Africa is overwhelmingly a product of colonialism," says
Andrew Novak, an adjunct professor of criminology, law, and society at George
Mason University in Virginia and author of a forthcoming book on the death
penalty in Africa. "Colonial powers used executions to showcase state power and
put the fear of god in their subjects. It was a tool to make people comply with
the law by terrifying them."
Brutality of colonial history
That dark history has warped the continent's contemporary views on capital
punishment, Mr. Novak says, though not always in straightforward ways.
In some countries, like South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, the
brutality of colonial executions - particularly those carried out against the
countries' freedom fighters - led to a dramatic reduction or outright abolition
of the practice after independence. South Africa, which in the waning days of
apartheid executed more people annually than any other country, abolished the
practice formally in a unanimous court decision in 1995, echoing back to the
country's apartheid-era justice system when it argued that "retribution cannot
be accorded the same weight under our Constitution as the right to life and
dignity."
Other countries, however, learned a more sinister lesson from their colonial
experience: capital punishment works as a tool to intimidate your population
into submission. In the past year, four countries in Africa - Somalia, Chad,
South Sudan, and Sudan - carried out at least 43 executions according to
Amnesty, though the organization believes the true figure in some of those
countries may be considerably higher.
"What the African countries who executed people in 2015 all have in common is a
history of systematic violation of human rights" more broadly, says Netsanet
Belay, Amnesty International's Africa director for research and advocacy. "They
are all places known for grossly unfair trials and the suppression of basic
rights."
Across the continent, 443 new death sentences were imposed in 2015, down from
909 in 2014. But most of those criminals will likely never be executed, says
Novak, since many have paradoxically been sentenced to death in countries that
never or almost never carry out the practice.
Kenya, for instance, has one of the largest death rows in the world, owing to
laws that make a sentence of death mandatory for both murder and armed robbery.
But the country's last execution - for coup-plotting - was carried out nearly
30 years ago.
And while both Zimbabwe and Swaziland technically allow the death penalty, each
has struggled in recent years with an unusual staffing problem - they can't
find a qualified hangman.
A broken system
Still, "one shouldn't overlook the people trapped in a broken system," says
Thomas Probert, a senior research with the unlawful killings unit at the
University of Pretoria's Centre for Human Rights. "There are likely thousands
of people on death row across the continent for whom the fact that their
government hasn't executed anyone for 10 years is only a small consolation."
Even in African countries where the death penalty is rare or de facto
prohibited, activists say it can continue to haunt the legal system, draining
disproportionate resources from already over-burdened courts and prisons.
But in countries saddled with a wide spectrum of human rights concerns -
including, in many cases, extrajudicial killings by police, militaries, and
armed groups - formally abolishing the death penalty is often low on national
priority lists. Just 18 of Africa's 54 countries have outlawed the practice
completely, although Amnesty considers another 16 to have "de facto" done away
with capital punishment.
But advocates for full abolition say these de facto moratoriums on execution
can be fragile, particularly when regimes change or wars are waged. Chad, for
instance, had not carried out an execution in more than a decade when it
executed 10 suspected members of the terror cell Boko Haram last year for
carrying out an attack that killed 38 people in the city of N'Djamena in June.
Still, Africa is doing considerably better than its northerly neighbors. In
2015, nearly 90 % of all executions recorded by Amnesty (which crucially leaves
out China, where execution figures are a state secret) occurred in just 3
countries - Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Globally, the organization notes,
executions were up 54 % in 2015 over the previous year, from 1,061 people
globally to 1,634.
But focusing on those figures obscure the march of progress seen in Africa and
elsewhere, Mr. Probert says.
"Advocacy around the death penalty for very obvious reasons tends to focus on
the really intransigent, retentionist states ... that execute scores if not
hundreds of people per year," he says. "But behind those headlines is a
less-often-told story about the remarkable decline of the practice of the death
penalty in the rest of the world over the last 50 years. Those states that
still have the death penalty on their books - in Africa and elsewhere - are
behind the curve of history."
(source: Christian Science Monitor)
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