Oct. 22
CHINA:
'Shocking' sentence: Hebei man who killed village chief after house demolition
to be executed
A Chinese man who killed a village chief who arranged for his house to be
demolished will be executed in the coming days. The ruling against 30-year-old
Jia Jinglong was delivered to his lawyer on Tuesday.
Jia is from Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province in northern China.
After his house was demolished in 2013, he killed the chief in February 2015
with a modified nail gun.
His lawyer Wei Rujiu told US-backed Radio Free Asia that he received the
verdict from the Supreme People's Court. It said that Jia's execution would
take place within a few days, and that there was no chance of the decision
being reversed.
According to US-backed news Voice of America, Jia was renovating the house in
preparation for his wedding but the relationship ended as a result of a forced
demolition by village chief He Jianhua.
The death penalty was approved by the Supreme Court in Henan on August 31,
reported RFA.
William Nee, researcher at Amnesty International, told HKFP that Jia's sentence
is seen by many experts as harsh by Chinese legal standards.
"Given the fact that China currently has the policy of "killing fewer, killing
cautiously", this case seems shocking," he wrote in an email.
He said that the short time period of 7 days between ratifying the sentence and
execution is stipulated by law in China.
"Many scholars have identified this short period as problematic if China were
ever to come into compliance with international law on the death penalty, since
under international law a person who has been given a death sentence should be
given the chance to apply for pardon or have the sentence commuted. But China
doesn't have this sort of mechanism," he said.
Nationalistic tabloid the Global Times reported on Friday that several Chinese
law experts had voiced their opposition to the immediate execution order. Zhang
Qianfan, a law professor at Peking University, told the tabloid that the affair
was also an institutional failure. "Any ordinary person could resort to the
same means as Jia when facing unfair treatment," he said.
'Extremely cruel murder'
The tabloid cited a copy of the verdict it received as saying that the method
of the murder was extremely cruel and caused severe social impact, and that the
conviction was appropriate and accurate.
Wei told RFA that over 200 mainland citizens signed a petition on WeChat
requesting that the death penalty be commuted. He said there were 3 reasons for
the petition: one was that Jia was himself a victim of ill-treatment from He
Jianhua; the 2nd reason was that Jia had turned himself in, and the 3rd reason
was that he did not hurt innocent people while committing his crime. If Jia is
executed, other desperate people may not consider sparing innocent bystanders,
and other criminals may think that turning themselves in is unsafe, said Wei.
Although no recent reports of the case by mainland media could be found apart
from the Global Times report, several posts about Jia's story were uploaded on
WeChat by bloggers.
Nee adds: "the fact that the local newspapers have not reported the death
penalty ratification also shows how the authorities sometimes manipulate public
opinion about the death penalty by widely publicising the most horrific cases,
while staying silent or even censoring news about potentially controversial
cases."
(source: hongkongfp.com)
*********************
'We might abolish the death penalty in 20 years': He Jiahong on justice in
China
Born into China's cultural revolution, He Jiahong spent years working in the
fields before studying law to win over his girlfriend's parents. Now he is a
leading authority on miscarriages of justice, and a writer of hit detective
novels to boot.
The undead take on a central role in Prof He Jiahong's extraordinary narratives
of courtroom incompetence. They haunt the commanding certainties of the trial
process and the execution yard.
But He is not a connoisseur of Halloween magic. As China's leading authority on
miscarriages of justice and the author of a series of detective novels, the
63-year-old former prosecutor and acclaimed academic has exposed heart-stopping
flaws in judicial procedures.
His meticulous and engaging research exposed the infamous case of Teng
Xingshan, who was executed in 1989 for murdering his mistress. 6 years later
Teng's supposed victim, Shi Xiaorong, was discovered to be alive.
In another case documented in He's latest book, Back from the Dead, She
Xianglin was convicted of murdering his wife and imprisoned. 11 years later,
she reappeared in her native village, astonishing her family. In both cases,
the verdicts were belatedly overturned.
At a time when nationalism is on the rise, He's critique of a justice system on
the opposite side of the world might seem like an esoteric diversion. But his
ability to develop universal criminal justice lessons from forced confessions,
the pressure of pubic opinion and misinterpretation of scientific evidence have
chilling echoes in a country that jailed the Birmingham 6 and the Guildford 4.
Only this year, the UK's supreme court ruled that for the past 30 years British
judges have been misconstruing crucial aspects of the joint enterprise
guidelines, which may yet lead to scores, if not hundreds, of cases being
reassessed and possibly retried.
Britain and China's judiciaries, if not on the road to convergence, are sharing
more and more legal experience through exchange visits and lectures. In May,
Lord Neuberger, president of the UK's supreme court, led a judicial delegation
to Beijing. Prof He is an adviser to China's supreme court and director of the
Centre for Common Law in Beijing, which works in co-operation with the Great
Britain-China Centre and the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law.
In London this month to launch his book, He cuts a dapper figure in a neat blue
suit, buttoned up at the neck. His English is crisp and fluent; his personal
odyssey from agricultural labourer to pre-eminent legal scholar verges on the
fantastical.
He was born in Beijing in 1953. During the cultural revolution he was sent to
work on a farm. "I believed in communism," he recalls. After a few years,
though, he began to feel he had been fooled, and started writing a novel to
prove he possessed talent. When he completed it, he was allowed to return to
the capital, where he worked as a plumber. There he fell in love with a
beautiful young woman. "She was a doctor; it was a very good job," he says. Her
parents tried to separate them.
They set up a challenge. "If I could pass a national exam for university ...
they would be happy to meet me. I had had only 6 years of education," He
recalls. "The examination was very competitive. I prepared for 6 months and
passed."
On enrolment at university, he randomly selected law. "I didn't know [about
it]," he admits. "Under the cultural revolution there was no law." 2 years
later, after finishing his course in record time, he married his girlfriend.
They have been together for 35 years, and have a daughter and a grandson.
He is an optimist. Accustomed to hard work on the farm, he believes the
experience helped him power through academic challenges. "It's not a bad thing
for people to have hard lives and frustrations when they are young,' he says.
Of the cultural revolution, he is less forgiving: "My 2nd novel [published by
Penguin] is entitled Black Holes. The cultural revolution was a black hole. It
changed the lives of millions of people."
The death penalty, real and fictional, has been a recurrent theme in He's work.
Eventually, he hopes, its use may cease. Opinion polls conducted in 2002, he
says, showed public support for executions running at around 93% of the
population. It was considered a natural part of Chinese culture.
"At the time, I said that we cannot abolish the death penalty. We have to
respect public opinion. If you kill somebody then you should be killed. About
10 years later, I changed my mind," he says. "Public opinion can be changed
with education. More and more people think that [considering human rights] the
death penalty is not a natural role for human beings."
Around 2005, the Chinese authorities introduced a criminal justice reform known
as the "kill fewer, kill carefully" reforms. In 2014, an amendment to the
criminal law further reduced the number of offences that carry the death
penalty.
Support for capital punishment is now around 70-80%, and coming down. He has
advocated abolishing it gradually over the next 2 decades. "In fact, we may not
abolish the death penalty [straight away]," he suggests. "We might not use it.
We would wait and see; if we don't use the death penalty for a number of years,
then people in China would be persuaded. Then we may legally abolish the death
penalty in 20 years. But it all depends on the situation ... the government is
facing the threat of terrorists [militant groups from within the separatist
Muslim Uighur ethnic group] and drug trafficking."
The number of executions is a state secret. Figures are disputed. While as many
as 12,000 people might have been killed in 2002, according to the Dui Hua
Foundation, a human rights campaign group, the annual total estimated by
foreign observers is more than 1,000 deaths.
"We should not keep secret the numbers ... policy has been changing in the
supreme peoples' court in China," He says. "We should have stricter scrutiny of
death penalties. We have to change the mentality of the decision makers. These
wrongful convictions made [the authorities] have second thoughts."
In 2007, the authorities decided to return to the supreme people's court the
power to review any death penalty. It had previously been entrusted to lower
courts because there were too many cases for the supreme court to consider.
Trafficking in the organs of those who have been executed has also been banned.
20 years ago, Back from the Dead could not have been published, He admits. "I
started studying wrongful convictions in 2005. And at the time people thought
it was wrong. It was difficult to have a dialogue openly in conferences at
first.
"Chinese people would say: 'We have some dirty things, but we should not let
foreigners know.' That was quite natural. But the leaders of the judiciary have
had to accept that we must deal with the problem more openly, and that wrongful
convictions can teach us lessons," He says.
"It is not a matter of viewing police or prosecutors as evil gangs. Mistakes
can be genuine errors. The problems have a positive role in provoking judicial
reform. I point out the loopholes ... perhaps other countries have better
rules, but they still have miscarriages of justice one way or another. It's a
challenge for all human societies."
In terror trials, He points out, there may be greater public demand to convict
and to use torture on top of all the other pressures. Beatings were widely
misused in the 1980s and 90s. "Now we have rules against torture. You can't say
it's very good, but it's better [at preventing] illegally obtained evidence,"
he says. "And interrogations are videotaped. These things help to prevent
torture."
Earlier campaigns against corruption were handled by the party's committees,
which acted outside legal frameworks. "They ought to be restrained by criminal
procedure law," He says. Chinese water torture, he points out, was not devised
by the Chinese; it is originally from Vietnam.
He practised as a defence lawyer for several years in the 1980s before
transferring to academia. Inspiration for the 1st in his series of 5 detective
novels, Hanging Devils, came from his research into miscarriages of justice. It
is set on a state farm in a city in the north-east of China.
The book's protagonist, Hing Jun, is a defence lawyer. "He has to travel up
north to solve a wrongful conviction case. I had a problem with how to frame
the story at first. In China at the time, defence lawyers had only 7 days to
prepare the trial. It would not have been enough time to collect all the
evidence.
"Then we revised our criminal procedure so that defence lawyers would have 2
months to prepare a case [on appeal]. In 2012 we made further progress when the
accused were given the right to a lawyer at the 1st investigation. Crime
fiction is just a way to tell the story."
(source: The Guardian)
SAUDI ARABIA:
Doubts Over Saudi-UK 'Assurances' on Juvenile Executions
3 Saudi juveniles remain on death row, 1 year after the UK began seeking
'assurances' that they would not be executed.
Abdullah Hasan al-Zaher, Ali al Nimr, and Dawood al-Marhoon were aged 15, 17
and 17 respectively when they were arrested for allegedly taking part in
protests in the country's eastern province. All 3 face beheading after they
were sentenced in the secretive Specialised Criminal Court, on the basis of
'confessions' they signed following torture. Last September, the death
sentences of the 3 were upheld, and they could now be executed at any time.
The UK has a close relationship with Saudi Arabia, and for the past year, the
UK Foreign Office has sought regular 'assurances' from the Saudi government
that the three would not be executed. Last month, Foreign Office Minister
Tobias Ellwood told Parliament: "our expectation remains that they will not be
executed."
However, the 3 juveniles remain on death row, and their families say that they
fear the executions could go ahead without warning. Speaking to Channel 4 last
month, Ali al Nimr's father, Mohammed al Nimr, said that his son was "waiting
to be called" to the "execution square."
Concerns for the 3 juveniles have been heightened by recent reports of other
rights abuses in the country. Earlier this week, it was reported that the Saudi
authorities had executed a member of the royal family for the 1st time in 40
years; while Saudi blogger, Raif Badawi, is said to be facing a new round of
'lashes' as part of a flogging sentence handed down for his criticisms of the
government.
The British government has so far stopped short of calling for the 3 juveniles'
death sentences to be scrapped - something that other governments, such as
France, have done. Human rights organization Reprieve has written to the Prime
Minister, Theresa May, asking her to request that Saudi Arabia commute the
sentences.
In January this year, several juveniles were among 47 prisoners executed en
masse in the Kingdom. They included Ali al-Ribh, a teenager from the Eastern
Province who, like Ali, Abdullah and Dawood, was arrested in school in the wake
of protests. Last week, a UK Foreign Office minister said that she was
"horrified" by news of the mass execution.
Commenting, Maya Foa, a director of Reprieve, said:
"It's appalling that Ali al Nimr, Abdullah al-Zaher and Dawood al-Marhoon could
be beheaded at any moment for the so-called 'crime' of attending a protest.
Saudi Arabia's 'assurances' that they won't execute these 3 boys count for
nothing when the Kingdom has continued to behead juveniles and other prisoners,
many of whom were tortured into bogus 'confessions.' Theresa May must call
urgently for these death sentences to be scrapped."
###
Reprieve is a UK-based human rights organization that uses the law to enforce
the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantanamo Bay.
(source: commondreams.org)
TANZANIA:
Mwalimu Nyerere views on Death Penalty
The Month of October to me means 2 things. The 1st and foremost is
commemoration of Mwalimu Nyereres' Death and secondly marking of the World Day
against Death Penalty.
Interestingly, Mwalimu Nyerere is in record of speaking aloud of his
displeasure on the death penalty and coincidently his death commemoration goes
together with the World Day against Death Penalty; precisely for the last 17
years we kept on paraphrasing his legacy yet forgetting this one!
Mwalimu Nyerere's remarks on the death sentences were conveyed to the right
people at the right time and at the right place when he was bidding goodbye on
his retirement to the law enforcing agents (Police, Prisons and Immigration) at
the Prison Training College Ukonga, Dar es Salaam in 1985. His remarks were
convincingly alarming and that something had to done but surprisingly, to-date
nothing has come out of the ground.
Mwalimu said "as a President signing for execution order means, I am killing
the 2nd person, therefore in 1 case 2 people have to die!" He did not end up
there but also confirmed that one of the tasks he hated most as president was
the obligation of facilitating the death sentence.
These saddening remarks made by Mwalimu Nyerere came out of his experience
after he had constitutionally executed 161 condemned prisoners! And for the
prison officials would wish this law could be scrapped out to save them from
the horror of guarding the living dead.
Unfortunately statistics are difficult to come by from the official source.
However through the Position Paper of Children Education Society (CHESO) some
statistics could be obtained that at the time President Nyerere retired, he
officiated the death penalty to 161 (6 female and 155 male) prisoners and the
second phase President Mwinyi executed 77 prisoners.
I could not agree more with the action of the Legal and Human Right Centre
(LHRC) this year of filing a case against the Attorney-General to prosecute the
Government to finding alternatives to death penalty since there is no proof in
the death penalty preventing crime.
In this year's theme of the World against Death Penalty, "Execution is the
terrorist tool: stop the cycle of violence" seems to have targeted to all those
countries hesitant in abolishing capital punishment.
Among the African countries which have done away with death sentences include
South Africa, Rwanda, Namibia where the 17 countries are in Africa while 140
worldwide have scrapped Capital punishment in their statute books.
Every human being has the inherent right to life and this right must be
protected by law. The right to life is a supreme right without which, other
rights become insignificant. International human rights instrument has
guaranteed this right as the most sacrosanct in a number of treaties and
international instruments including the African Charter on Human and People's
Rights (ACHPR), 1981, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Even the mother law, the Constitution of the United Republic of Tanzania, 1977
guarantees the right to life yet it continues to be violated through laws that
impose the death penalty.
Last year Tanzania initiated its groundbreaking approach on abolishment of
death penalty through Parliamentary Group for Global Action (PGA) in a
Roundtable Meeting held in the country.
This roundtable was also attended by Chair of the Law Reform Commission of
Tanzania Judge Aloysius Mujulizi who confirmed that the Commission has on two
occasions recommended the abolition of the death penalty, reminding that the
death penalty in Tanzania has no indigenous origin and thus does not have such
a strong popular support as some may claim. However the last execution in
Tanzania was in 1994, since then the country has maintained abolitionist de
facto status.
MPs from all parties and relevant actors have been sensitised on the abolition
of the death penalty, and several MPs have committed to introducing a private
bill to abolish it. People on death row in Tanzania neither deterred nor
decreased incidences of the crime of murder.
In terms of statistics in this regard, from 1961 to April 2007, a total of
2,562 Prisoners (2476 males and 84 females) were sentenced to death across
Tanzania. During this period, 238 of the Prisoners (232 males and 6 females)
were hanged.
Despite the fact that 238 prisoners on death row were hanged, the number of
murder incidences has kept increasing tremendously from 46 in 1961 to 3,929 in
2013.
Currently, there are 228 condemned prisoners waiting for execution while 244
are waiting for their appeals. The death row syndrome is a psychological
disorder that inmates on death row can go through when they are put in
isolation.
Inmates on death row syndrome face suicidal attempts and psychotic delusions.
According to some psychiatrists, the results of being confined to death row for
an extended period of time, including the effects of knowing one will die and
the living conditions, can fuel suicidal tendencies in an individual. According
to the government stand on capital punishment would like it to be decided by
people's wishes and not on the external pressure.
Capital punishment is simply popular because the general public has little
confidence in the government and state agencies, universally perceived as
corrupted, inefficient and ineffective.
At the level of the masses, the ignorance of the human rights approach to the
death penalty, exacerbated by illiteracy, makes the acceptation of arguments in
favour of the abolition of death penalty even more difficult.
The moment a crime assumes notoriety or begins to overwhelm law enforcement
agents, public's response has been to impose the death penalty for such crimes
that include rape, corruption and so forth. What advocates for the death
penalty fail to understand is that the death penalty does not make the society
safe.
It may pander to the outrage of society but it does not remove the crime; which
should be the interest of government. Are we really ignorant of capital
punishment?
(source: Daily News)
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