March 24
IRAQ:
Iraq sentences alleged terrorist to death for suicide bombing attempt against
local forces
An Iraqi court on Sunday sentenced an alleged terrorist to death for attempting
to blow himself up on security forces in the province of Salahuddin.
The ruling was issued by the Salahuddin Criminal Court, which stated the
convicted man had been arrested in possession of a Glock pistol and an
explosive belt in the city of Tikrit, the hometown of Iraq’s former dictator,
Saddam Hussein.
The convicted man’s name was not mentioned, but the statement did mention that
the suspect confessed to killing someone in Tikrit he believed had given
information about his whereabouts to local authorities.
The court claimed the individual met with a terrorist commander in Salahuddin,
believed to be an Islamic State member, to discuss the opening of a shop to
keep explosive materials and build car bombs.
The statement added the death sentence was handed down “in accordance with the
provisions of Article IV / 1 of the Anti-Terrorism Law No. 13 of 2005.”
The court did not offer details about the background of the convict nor his
identity, and it did not outline when the arrest took place.
Recently, an Iraqi court sentenced a Belgian man to death by hanging for being
a member of the Islamic State.
Human rights groups have criticized inconsistencies in the judicial process and
flawed, expedited trials in Iraq which may result in false convictions.
The Islamic State emerged in Iraq in 2014 and quickly occupied vast swaths of
territory in the north. In late 2017, Iraq declared final victory against them,
but the extremist group continues to launch insurgency attacks, ambushes, and
kidnappings across the country.
(source: kurdistan24.net)
BRUNEI:
Brunei to pass law that will punish gay sex with death by stoning
Brunei will pass its Sharia Penal Code (SPC) by 3 April, Gay Star News has
learned.
The controversial penal code includes death by stoning for people convicted of
sodomy, among other numerous brutal sentences.
Other Sharia punishments include the amputation of limbs for those found guilty
of theft. Anyone found guilty of apostasy will be handed a death sentence.
‘I am extremely concerned by this move. Some of the laws that we are about to
see implemented are horrendous and unjustifiable,’ Matthew Woolfe, founder and
director of The Brunei Project, tells Gay Star News.
The Brunei Project is one of few civil society groups focused on advocating for
LGBTI rights in Brunei.
‘While homosexual acts were already criminalized in Brunei under laws that were
inherited from British colonial rule, we are going to see this taken to a new
level.
‘Whippings and stoning to death [will be] added to the punishments potentially
facing LGBT+ in Brunei if they are found guilty of engaging in same-sex
relations.’
The Brunei Project has pledged to raise international awareness of the Sharia
laws prior to their implementation in early April.
The Bruneian Attorney General’s Chambers website officially posted plans to
fast-track implementation of the SPC on 29 December 2018.
However there were no public announcements regarding the implementation of the
law. The news was also not picked up by local media.
‘It all seems to be very hush-hush,’ says Woolfe.
‘I suspect the Brunei Government is trying to fly under the radar with the
final implementation.’
The Sultan of Brunei, the country’s absolute ruler, first announced plans to
introduce the SPC in 3 stages in 2014.
However, the announcement was met with significant public outcry. A number of
celebrities and public figures such as Ellen DeGeneres, Stephen Fry, and Virgin
CEO Richard Branson boycotted Brunei-connected businesses.
Brunei has signed up to the UN Convention against Torture
While the first stage has been implemented, the latter two experienced
significant holdups.
‘Implementation of the first phase was met with such an uproar internationally
that I think Brunei wanted to delay further implementation until everyone had
pretty much forgotten about these laws,’ Woolfe explains.
Outrage over Brunei’s Sharia Penal Code has died down significantly over recent
years. The country has since returned to relative international obscurity,
rarely featuring in the international press.
Woolfe is hopeful that with enough international attention, there is a chance
Brunei could wind back the laws or never carry out the stoning sentence.
He also maintains that by implementing the laws, the Bruneian government would
be in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman
or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. The country signed up to the UN
convention in 2015 though is yet to ratify.
‘Implementing these laws is really going to tarnish the image of Brunei as a
peaceful and harmonious society and also as a country that can be trusted to
stand by the commitments it makes to upholding international law,’ he adds.
Culture of fear in Brunei’s LGBTI community
If the stoning law is implemented, the burden of proof for conviction will be
high.
The plaintiff must willingly confess. Alternatively, at least four people must
testify to having seen the individual commit a homosexual sex.
However, the prospect of anti-LGBTI laws has pushed many of the LGBTI community
further into hiding and stoked anti-LGBTI sentiment among the population of the
majority-Mulsim country.
In October last year, Gay Star News interviewed a young gay Bruneian man who
spoke of his concerns about the law.
Khairul (not his real name) said that anti-LGBTI sentiment is rife in the tiny
Southeast Asian nation. Many LGBTI people remain closeted out of fear of
persecution.
‘I feel like it’s going backward and getting to a worse situation,’ Khairul
said in the interview.
‘In all honesty, I feel like I can’t do much. I feel like I can’t even help my
community by protecting them. If someone was out openly and they get attacked
I’d feel like I’d need to protect them, but I’m scared that I can’t.’
(source: Gay Star News)
EGYPT:
Why executions in Egypt are skyrocketing and why they should end----Executions,
particularly in cases of alleged political violence, only widen the sense of
societal injustice
Egypt has been moving fast to execute detainees, with President Abdel Fattah
el-Sisi himself apparently backing this terrible spike in death sentences in
2019.
Recently Sisi lectured his critics, including European leaders, at the Arab-EU
summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, suggesting that executing detainees is part of “our
humanity”, which is different from “your [European] humanity”.
Yet when speaking about values, the president's justification speaks little
truth, and aims to conceal an unprecedented crisis in Egypt’s recent history.
Under Sisi, Egypt’s use of the death penalty has soared, with more than 2,300
executions ordered since 2013.
This escalation is actually a break from past practices observed even under
former President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year authoritarian rule, of commuting or
halting some death sentences, and even under former President Anwar Sadat whose
assassins were never executed.
This surge should bring significant scrutiny, but Sisi’s government has worked
to quash any free dialogue about the death penalty, while working in tandem to
silence organisations that shed light on human rights abuses.
Disinformation campaign
Since 2014, when Sisi became president, Egypt has been among the 10 countries
with the highest numbers of annual executions, joining other notorious
executors of the death penalty like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
And since 2014, criminal and military courts have issued more than 2,500
initial death sentences, hundreds of them in cases of alleged political
violence, which are usually marred with severe due process violations.
In comparison with past practice, an international rights group found that
Egyptian criminal courts had issued 530 death sentences between 1991 and 2000,
which was also a period of political violence in Egypt.
Right now, there are about 50 people who are at risk of execution at any
moment, after their death sentences have been confirmed by military or civilian
appeals courts.
As part of his disinformation campaign, Sisi has aimed to portray human rights
values as “Western” and “foreign” to Egypt. In fact, many brave Egyptians have
for years campaigned against the death penalty, including lawyer Nasser Amin,
anthropologist Reem Saad and historian Khaled Fahmy, among others.
Sisi has tried to portray the death penalty as a broadly accepted practice, but
in reality, its use has been declining worldwide. According to a 2015 UN
report, around 160 countries - including countries in Asia, Africa and Latin
America and many Muslim countries- have ended the death penalty in law or in
practice.
In 2017, Egypt was among only 23 countries that have carried out executions.
This was a big move for the judiciary towards becoming a tool of oppression
So why have executions been skyrocketing in Egypt? The answer to this question
is also central to understanding why they should be halted.
After the July 2013 military coup that forcibly removed Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s
first democratically elected president, the military-backed government
prosecuted thousands of Muslim Brotherhood leaders, members and sympathisers,
often in mass trials over alleged political violence.
At that time, the country was still in severe political turmoil and the
military rulers had not yet asserted their full control over traditionally
independent state institutions. This included the judiciary at that time, where
many criminal court judges simply opted to quit overseeing such cases.
Who are the nine men executed in Egypt on 20 February 2019?
Mahmoud el Ahmady, 23, student of translation studies at Al-Azhar University
Ahmed Wahdan, 30, civil engineer
Abulqasem Youssef, 25, student at Al-Azhar University
Ahmed Gamal Higazi, 23, Student at Al-Azhar University.
Abubakr Ali, 24, student at Zagazig Universiry.
Abdulrahman Sulaiman Mohamed, 26, sales representative
Ahmed el-Degwy, 25, student at the Modern Academy in Cairo.
Ahmed Mahrous Abdelrahman, 27, student at Al-Azhar University
Islam Mohamed Mekkawy, 25, student at Al-Azhar University
In response, in late 2013 the government created special “terrorism courts”
within the criminal court system and assigned willing judges to oversee cases
of alleged political violence.
This was a big move for the judiciary towards becoming a tool of oppression and
a major attack on the judiciary’s independence. These so-called terrorism
courts, particularly a handful of judges, issued hundreds of death sentences.
Hands 'tied by laws'
But the Cassation court, Egypt’s highest appellate court, continued to act as a
relatively strong check on those flawed convictions by overturning many of them
between 2014 and 2016
. As a highly respected court, it was hard for the government to undermine its
independence - at least until the assassination of Hisham Barakat, the former
prosecutor-general, in June 2015.
At his funeral, Sisi remarked: “The hand of justice is tied by laws… We can not
wait for that.” Furiously critical of the judges present around him for slowing
down the implementation of his own vision of "justice", the president pledged
to amend the country's laws.
He kept that promise.
In April 2017, Sisi approved amendments to Egypt’s Criminal Procedural Code and
the law concerning appeals before the Cassation Court in order to circumvent
the Court of Cassation - developments that Amnesty International described as a
“nail in the coffin of fair trial standards”.
Since then, the Cassation Court’s role in overturning flawed death sentences
has been severely diminished, and it has upheld scores of them.
Additionally, and even before Barakat’s assassination, Sisi had issued an
unprecedented law in October 2014 that extended the jurisdiction of military
courts to prosecute civilians.
Since then, over 15,000 civilians have been referred for military prosecution,
leading to scores of additional death sentences by inherently unjust courts.
Public criticism
Since 2011, Egypt has been undergoing an intense political turmoil. And while
there is no evidence that the death penalty deters serious crimes, executions,
especially in cases of alleged political violence, would only widen the sense
of injustice, especially since there is neither any vision nor any promise for
transitional justice.
Let’s not forget that this executions spree is also happening in a country
whose security forces have killed hundreds of peaceful protesters since 2011
with near-absolute impunity, and have been accused in incidents of
extrajudicial executions of detainees as well.
Egyptian justice is not only so often unjust, but it is “malfunctioning”, to
the extent that a judge’s signature on a death sentence was found to be forged.
Trials are systematically flawed, with one judge sentencing more than 500
people to death in one case, and another sentencing a four-year-old toddler to
life in prison, in what was later called a "mistake".
There is a serious concern that after several years of rolling back due process
protections, and eroding the independence of the judiciary, the floodgates are
set to open for a wave of executions conducted after massively unfair trials.
What’s needed is not patiently listening to Sisi’s fact-free lectures about
human rights values in Egypt, but rather sustained and public criticism,
including by Egypt’s allies, against the government’s apparent desire to carry
out more death sentences against victims of a broken and flawed judicial
process.
(source: Opinion, Amr Magdi, Middle East Eye)
SAUDI ARABIA:
Saudi Arabia is on course to behead more people than ever before in 2019
Saudi Arabia is on track to set a new record for beheading people in 2019 if it
maintains its current intensity for the rest of the year.
The kingdom executed 43 people between January 1 and March 13, which trumps the
48 people beheaded between the January and April of 2018, the previous noted
record.
Rights groups began documenting execution numbers in the early 2000s. The
figures have been trending upwards.
So far in 2019, 21 people have been beheaded for drugs offences alone. The most
recent was a Syrian man killed on March 13 for smuggling amphetamine pills.
The crimes which warrant the death penalty — either by beheading or
crucifixion— include murder, terrorism, rape, robbery, arson, burglary, drug
trafficking or possession, adultery, renouncing Islam, treason, and espionage.
Saudi Arabia is often ruthless in dispensing the judgment.
On January 2, 2016, 47 imprisoned people convicted for terrorism were beheaded
simultaneously across 12 different provinces,
It was Saudi Arabia's largest mass execution since 63 rebels were executed for
seizing Mecca's Grand Mosque in 1980.
In 2015, Saudi authorities posted a job advert for 8 new executioners to keep
up with the rising number of death penalties.
The job description asked for no prerequisite skills, but said the role
includes "executing a judgment of death."
While Saudi Arabia is notorious for administering the death penalty, it still
trails behind China and Iran, according to a 2017 Amnesty report.
In Iran between 249 and 285 people were executed in 2018, according to Iranian
rights groups.
In 4th and 5th place behind Saudi Arabia are Iraq and Pakistan.
(source: thisinsider.com)<
INDONESIA:
Call on Indonesia to abolish death penalty
“Abolition now! Abolition now!” Hundreds of human rights campaigners from
countries across the world chanted this as they marched on the streets of
Brussels, calling for the universal end to capital punishment. The participants
of the rally, which was held recently in Belgium’s capital as part of the
closing event for the 7th World Congress against the Death Penalty, held up a
large banner emblazoned with the words “Say No to the Death Penalty”. Fatia
Maulidyanti, an activist from the Jakarta-based Commission for the Disappeared
and Victims of Violence (Kontras), said she was happy to take part in the rally
and to see that calls on countries to abolish death penalty were mounting.
(source: The Jakarta Post)
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