Sept. 8
IRAN:
38 People Executed in August 2019----The actual number of executions may be
even higher than reported.
At least 38 people were executed in August 2019 in Iran. In sum, between
January 1 and August 31, 2019, at least 185 people have been executed in the
country. The number shows an increase compared to the same period last year.
According to the Iran Human Rights statistic department, at least 38 people
were executed in August 2019 in Iran, including 2 public hangings and 36
executions inside prisons.
Most of those executed (30), were sentenced to qisas (retribution in kind) for
murder charges. 6 others were executed for drug-related charges and 2 for
Moharebeh (waging war against God).
Iranian officials or media have only announced 13 executions in August 2019.
The rest were confirmed by Iran Human Rights (IHR). Only unannounced executions
confirmed by two independent sources are included in our reports. Therefore,
the actual number of executions may be even higher than reported.
The number of executions in August 2019 shows a rise compared with the same
period last year. In August 2018, at least 20 people were executed in Iran.
Moreover, 185 people have been executed between January 1 and August 31, 2019.
This figure also shows a rise compare to the same period last year which 165
executions were recorded.
(source: Iran Human Rights)
SOUTH AFRICA:
The state has no business administering the death penalty
Neither the death penalty, nor a state of emergency can curb the savage
violence that society appears to have licensed. Only a restoration of values
and an effective state can, writes Ebrahim Fakir.
The past few days have seen renewed calls for the reintroduction of capital
punishment and the imposition of a "state of emergency" in response to the
wanton brutality, criminality and impunity of the recurrently xenophobic, but
more properly, generalised criminal violence and theft.
The long scourge of brutal rape of and violence against women, which culminated
this past week in the rape and murder of Uyinene Mrwetyana have intensified
these calls.
The death penalty and a state of emergency are considered by some of its
proponents locally as an antidote to the inability of authorities to
effectively police recurrent outbreaks of criminal looting and xenophobic
violence and the seemingly constant savage criminality that South Africans have
to live with. Those who want the imposition of capital punishment or the
declaration of a state of emergency believe that it will also serve to curb the
scourges that society's public morality and civic ethics have failed to contain
and miraculously restore them.
Surprisingly, calls for both feign ignorance of South Africa's horrendous
apartheid past, which eroded all sense of public ethics but worse, when these
were used - not as instruments of effective policing and social control, but -
as instruments of political oppression and socio-economic marginalisation and
exclusion.
My concern here is two-fold. Apart from being inhumane and ineffective, capital
punishment is premised on a society anchored in unmediated vengeance,
victimisation and retribution rather than reconciliatory rehabilitation.
Apart from the moral problematic, the administration of capital punishment and
its utility as a deterrent is entirely dependent on capable and effective
policing and the efficient administration of justice. States of emergencies
extend the power of the repressive instruments of the state in extraordinary
ways, which, to be a means for the restoration of social order, requires
reasonable levels of state capacity, especially in the criminal justice
cluster. This can't be said of South Africa at present, which would render both
these measures moot, except to entrench the well-known impunity with which an
incapable, inept and corrupted security establishment behaves and further
license the impudent unaccountability of the political class in charge of them.
For good reason, capital punishment was scrapped in 1995. Instrumentally, the
re-imposition of capital punishment will require a two-thirds majority in the
National Assembly and the support of six of the nine provinces in the National
Council of Provinces (NCOP). This implies that six of the nine provinces will
need to resolve in favour of capital punishment at provincial level and
instruct their delegations to the NCOP to support a resolution in favour of it.
This is an unlikely prospect. But the elaborate and practical legislative
process impediment ought to be less serious a consideration. The values of
society and the use of these instruments as effective modes of deterring
criminal barbarism and social control are.
On this score, the evidence is that in South Africa this is unlikely to be
prudent, or effective.
Globally, there is no proof that capital punishment is effective as a deterrent
to abhorrent violent crime. In South Africa this is compounded by the manifest
and serious weaknesses and failings in the police and justice systems. These
need to be prioritised in an effort to reduce violent crime and combat
gender-based violence.
If there is no guarantee that a person committing a crime will be caught and
apprehended, or that real detective capacity exists to gather intelligence,
detect and thoroughly investigate, that prosecutions are properly handled, and
appropriate and fair sanctions and punishment is handed down that befit, then
the basic requirements for the threat of capital punishment to work as a
deterrent are absent, then capital punishment will be ineffectual and make no
difference.
With its imposition being irreversible, and confidence in the competence of the
security and justice cluster low, coupled with a lack of trust, the fear of
incorrect conviction, manipulation of justice processes to victimise, is a real
one. There are many examples, particularly in the US, of suspects being put to
death only for their innocence to be proven years later on the basis of new
information coming to light.
It is astounding therefore that there are calls for capital punishment when the
basic functions of the criminal justice system upon which its effective
administration and its deterrent ability depend, is widely derided as being
incapable and untrustworthy.
After all, for the death penalty to be administered, the criminals have to be
caught. The SA Police Service is known for many things. Apprehending criminals
is not one of them.
What the SAPS is known for, apart from its sloth ineptitude and
ineffectiveness, is inappropriate and heavy-handed police brutality. Declaring
a state of emergency licenses this purported impunity and sanctions the police
brutality that is widely, justifiably feared. States of emergency provide the
police and security services with greater powers and functions, exercised with
less transparency, reduced accountability and limited supervision and oversight
over them. After all, the police and security agencies become the agents of
administering the state of emergency on behalf of the politicians who decide on
it.
As such security agencies can be easily used, abused and manipulated by
politicians. This mode of behaviour is precisely what South Africans have been
bemoaning about the last two decades of institutional and process manipulation
by the ANC and its deployed cadres in orienting public institutions, through
abuse and manipulation, to serve private ends rather than the public interest.
How much worse would this be, when the raft of the whole security establishment
is given over to craven politicians who, as will be the case in a state of
emergency, suspend all normal constitutional procedures, conventions and curbs
on power. That means the dilution of the separation of powers, loosening the
limits on the use of authority, no curbs on the exercise of executive power.
Can you imagine these powers in the hands of someone like Jacob Zuma, who with
South Africa's magnificent constitutional architecture and regulatory and
procedural infrastructure, managed with the help of the ANC and its party
apparatus, to bend the state to the arc of his and his malevolent friends'
corrupt will?
That President Cyril Ramaphosa may appear to be better than Zuma doesn't mean
that these extraordinary powers will be wisely used, or that they should be
afforded to him – and extended to the politicians that surround him. An ANC
which has lost influence and in power four metros, would love nothing more than
access to the unfettered power and authority that a state of emergency affords,
so that they can continue (ab)using authority and power through means foully
acquired and appropriated, rather than fairly and legitimately contested and
won.
Dealing with the scourge of brutal violent crime and the social psychosis
manifested in racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance means rooting
out the sloth, ineptitude and corruption in the security and intelligence
services and other public institutions. It also requires rehabilitating a
society which appears to have lost its basic values and given way to its savage
instincts.
In this context it makes no sense extending the powers, and burdening an
incapable state or imposing measures which have no hope of success because the
basic preconditions for its success are wholly absent.
** Ebrahim Fakir is the Director of Programs at the Auwal Socio Economic
Research Institute and serves on the Board of Directors of Afesis-Corplan, an
NGO in the Eastern Cape.
(source: Opinion; news24.com)
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