[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

May 14



SAUDI ARABIA:

Saudi Arabia prepares to hang opposition Shia cleric amid large protests



Human rights activists worldwide are demanding clemency for cleric Sheikh Nimr 
al-Nimr, sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia for taking part in Shia Muslim 
minority protests in 2011. They warn the execution could inflame the whole of 
the Middle East.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) an independent non-profit 
organization based in London, have asked the UN to intervene and prevent 
al-Nimr's execution. He is the most respected Shiite cleric in Saudi Arabia, 
where the majority of the approximately 18 million population are Sunni.

In their address they say: "It is a severe blight on the reputation of this 
office if it is not able to work to protect the rights of individuals to free 
speech, to protest, to practise their religion, to a fair trial, to not be 
subjected to torture, and the right to life."

Despite global condemnation the forthcoming execution has been largely ignored 
by Saudi Arabia's key allies - the UK and the US, nations that profess to 
upholding democratic values.

The representative of Bahraini Shiite leader, Shaykh Ali Salman, told the ABNA 
news agency that US Secretary of State John Kerry was dismayed by the Saudi 
decision to execute Ayatollah al-Nimr. Allegedly, Kerry was informed about the 
Saudi decision during a meeting in Riyadh on May 6.

"John Kerry expressed his surprise to President Barack Obama over the decision 
made by the House of Saud, and by their silence they gave the green light to 
Saudi Arabia to go ahead with the execution," the representative said.

In London, where Shia Muslims staged a #FreeNimr rally, RT spoke to former 
Bahraini MP Jawad Fayruz. He said since Saudi Arabia is "mainly backed by the 
US and the United Kingdom," it could be just "1 word" from US or UK officials 
to reverse things and save al-Nimr???' life.

"Our clear message is to Downing Street, to [PM] Cameron: you have the ability 
and you can do a lot of things," said Fayruz, explaining that the British prime 
minister could use his influence on Saudi Arabia and secure Sheikh Nimr 
al-Nimr's release.

The lawmaker also said: "There's no independent judiciary system in Saudi 
Arabia" and the case of Sheikh al-Nimr is "politically oriented." This is 
especially due to the ongoing war against Yemen, where Shia Houthi rebels 
overthrew the president, a Saudi Arabian protege.

Skeikh al-Nimr became a symbol of the 2011 insurrection when the Arab Spring 
came to Saudi Arabia. He led Shia Muslim street protests throughout the 
country, demanding constitutional changes, liberties and an end to anti-Shia 
discrimination in the kingdom.

Sheikh al-Nimr was arrested on July 8, 2012 in disputed circumstances, after 
police tracked him down in the eastern province of Qatif and shot him in the 
leg during a shootout.

The Sheikh's relatives insisted al-Nimr didn't own a gun, but the cleric was 
accused of terrorism and apostasy and put on trial in March 2013. Human rights 
activists shared concerns since the outset that al-Nimr was unlikely to get a 
fair trial.

The arrest of Skeikh al-Nimr provoked even more disturbances in Saudi Arabia, 
as protesters demanded his immediate release, which led to an even greater 
escalation of violence between protesters and Saudi security forces.

The arguably biased trial lasted until October 2014, with al-Nimr being 
sentenced to death for "disobeying the ruler," "inciting sectarian strife" and 
"encouraging, leading and participating in demonstrations."

The sentence aroused the strongest condemnation from international human rights 
watchdogs.

Joe Stork, the organization's deputy Middle East director, said: "Saudi 
Arabia's harsh treatment of a prominent Shia cleric is only adding to the 
existing sectarian discord and unrest," adding that if Saudi Arabia wants to 
gain stability in its eastern province, it should put an end to "systematic 
discrimination against Shia citizens."

According to Said Boumedouha, deputy director of Amnesty International's Middle 
East and North Africa Programme, "the death sentence against Sheikh Nimr Baqir 
al-Nimr is part of a campaign by the authorities in Saudi Arabia to crush all 
dissent, including those defending the rights of the Kingdom's Shiite Muslim 
community."

Shia Muslims around the world have been holding rallies and petitioning to 
prevent the execution. When Saudi Arabia announced al-Nimr will be executed on 
May 14, protests intensified and people took to the streets in Saudi Arabia, 
Bahrain, India and Iraq.

In Iran, the regional superpower and the only country with a predominantly 
Shiite population in the Middle East, clerics and scholars staged a mass sit-in 
on Wednesday in the 2 holy cities of Qom and Mashhad, to express their 
solidarity with Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr.

Iranian Shia Muslim clerics warned that Saudi Arabia is going to pay a heavy 
price if it dares to execute the religious leader, saying the execution could 
trigger "an earthquake" that would lead to the fall of the Saud dynasty.

Last week, following the beheading of five foreigners, human rights groups 
condemned Saudi Arabia for a dramatic increase in public executions. 80 people 
have already been executed so far in 2015, compared to 88 during the whole of 
2014.

Despite mounting international criticism from foreign governments and human 
rights campaigners, Saudi Arabia has shown no willingness to end public 
executions.

(source: rt.com)

**********************

Why Saudi Arabia is poised to behead a dissident cleric and publicly display 
his corpse



Saudi Arabia is set to behead a man and publicly display his headless body (a 
practice called "crucifixion" in Saudi law) - for nothing more than speaking 
his mind. Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr, an internationally respected Shia cleric, 
was sentenced to death for "disobeying the ruler," "inciting sectarian strife," 
and "encouraging, leading and participating in demonstrations." His actual 
crime: participating in nonviolent protests and calling for the fall of the 
house of Saud.

It's not clear when the Saudis plan on executing al-Nimr: the country has a 
habit of both postponing executions and carrying them out without very much 
warning. But the case illustrates a basic fact about one of America's closest 
allies in the Middle East: its system of capital punishment is one of the 
cruelest on earth.

Why is Saudi capital punishment so barbaric? In many ways, the story is less 
about religion than it is about Saudi Arabia's unusual politics; yes, Saudi 
Arabia has politics. At the heart of it is the relationship between the Saudi 
monarchy and the country's ultra-conservative clerical establishment - an 
arrangement that dates back to 1744.

Saudi Arabia is a world leader in gruesome executions

According to Amnesty International's latest figures, Saudi Arabia executed at 
least 90 people in 2014. That is more people than any other country except Iran 
and almost certainly China (human rights groups estimate China conducts 
hundreds or even thousands of annual executions).

"Most death sentences in Saudi Arabia are carried out by beheading, often in 
public," Sevag Kechichian, Amnesty's Saudi Arabia specialist, writes. Sometimes 
the Saudi government defaces the corpses afterward. The Death Penalty Database 
found "reports that Saudis have exposed the body (with head sewn back on) of 
the condemned to public indignity, including crucifixion, after execution."

Many of these people are executed for nonviolent crimes: in 2014, 42 of the 90 
people executed were convicted on drug-related charges. Their trials generally 
didn't even come close to being fair.

"Trials in death penalty cases are often held in secret. Defendants are rarely 
allowed formal representation by lawyers, and in many cases are not informed of 
the progress of legal proceedings against them," the Amnesty report found. 
"They may be convicted solely on the basis of 'confessions' obtained under 
duress or involving deception."

Saudi Arabia's legal system is deeply theocratic. The interpretation of Sharia 
law that dominates the Saudi criminal system is extremely harsh, and is viewed 
with horror in much of the Middle East. Which raises an obvious question: if 
Saudi Arabia's barbaric system is such an outlier in its region, how exactly 
did it get so terrible in the first place?

The politics behind Saudi Arabia's fundamentalism

In 1744, when the place we now know as Saudi Arabia was divided among many 
fractious clans, a minor clan leader named Mohammed ibn al-Saud met Muhammad 
ibn al-Wahhab, a Sunni religious figure preaching an austere, puritanical 
interpretation of Islam. They struck an alliance: Wahhab would support the 
Saudi family as political rulers, and the Saudis would spread Wahhab's 
ultra-conservative doctrine and let him set religious code within their 
territory.

Wahhabism, as Wahhab's doctrines came to be known, gave al-Saud a believing tax 
base and an ideological justification for uniting the peninsula under his rule. 
"Without Wahhabism," London School of Economics Professor Madawi al-Rasheed 
writes, "it is highly unlikely that ... [Saudi] leadership would have assumed 
much political significance."

The Wahhabi movement played an integral role in the Saudi rise to power, and 
while much happened between then and now (including the al-Sauds' loss of 
power), the power-sharing Saudi-Wahhabi alliance remains the core of the state 
ideology to this day.

That the punishments are medieval is the point

Wahhabism is a sort of fundamentalist revivalism, emphasizing a return to what 
its ultra-conservative proponents see as the core and original Muslim values. 
As such, it takes a fairly literalist view of Islamic law - and is willing to 
use the force of the state to back that up.

Punishments such as public beheadings are seen as barbaric by virtually the 
rest of the world - including the Muslim world. But in the Wahhabist view they 
are justified and, indeed, important, because they are perceived throwbacks to 
the Prophet Mohammed's 7th-century rule, and one of many ways in which the 
Wahhabists sought to turn back to clock to what they saw as a better era. That 
the punishments are medieval is the point.

In this view, "the death penalty or stoning for adultery and fornication, 
flogging and amputation for stealing, and punishments of retribution are 
sanctioned by the Quran and are unchangeable," legal scholar Shahid M. 
Shahidullah explains. Wahhabist interpretation of "sharia law is the exclusive 
foundation of criminal justice" in Saudi Arabia.

So the centuries-old political bargain between the Wahhabis and the ruling 
explains why the Saudi criminal code sanctions such brutal punishments.

Why terrible Wahhabist punishments persist to this day

In more recent generations, members of the Saudi royal family have been more 
likely to grow up exposed to outside ideas and educations, shaped by Western 
boarding schools and colleges as well as lots of time abroad. As that's 
happened, those individuals have drifted away from the country's Wahhabi roots.

That has brought some modest reforms to the justice system. But it has not 
changed the underlying system.

"Successive monarchs of the kingdom supported selective modernization of the 
kingdom in many areas, including law and justice," Shahidullah writes. "It is 
for this relatively liberal perspective of the Saudi ruling monarchy that a 
number of law and justice institutions have recently grown to establish strict 
procedural guidelines on the implementation of sharia law."

And yet, the beheadings remain. There are two main reasons for this, both of 
which have far more to do with politics than religion.

First, the Saudi royal family still believes it needs the support of the 
ultra-conservative clerical establishment to hold power, just as it did in the 
1700s. And brutal punishments are a way of appeasing those clerics. Second, the 
Saudi royal family is a dictatorship that earnestly fears unrest, and uses 
executions as one of several tools to stifle dissent or grassroots organizing.

"This situation puts Saudi Arabia at odds with the rest of the Arab world"

That 1st point, though, may be the most important. The Saudi monarchy sees 
itself as stuck between a powerful, ultra-conservative clerical establishment 
on one side and the practical realities of running a modern country on the 
other. Public beheadings are a means for the Saudi rulers perpetuate Wahhabist 
control over religious matters, and thus preempt Wahhabist opposition to the 
monarchy's modest modernizations and pro-Western foreign policy.

This tension has long defined the country: in 1979, religious extremists seized 
the Grand Mosque in Mecca, demanding the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy for 
betraying ultra-conservative Islamist ideals. The siege, which killed more than 
200 people, led the Saudis to try to prevent future attacks by co-opting 
radical Islam where it could - to be more extremist than the extremists.

In 1991, when elements of the Saudi clerical establishment practically revolted 
over the monarchy allowing US troops to temporarily base there, the monarchy 
again responded by co-opting the extremists, encouraging them to fund jihadists 
abroad rather than make trouble at home.

Public beheadings are one way the Saudis do this. The monarchy has given little 
indication that it considers human rights a priority, so it has been seemingly 
quite willing to trade them away.

In return, the religious establishment has rewarded the monarchy with loyalty 
that has been crucial to keeping the Saudis in power. "In every crisis the 
regime has faced since the founding of the modern Saudi state," Texas A&M's F. 
Gregory Gause writes, "the Wahhabi clerics holding high positions in the state 
religious hierarchy have rallied to the colors."

Even when it comes to something like commercial law, where the haphazard nature 
of Sharia law does actual harm to the Saudi economy and thus the regime's 
coffers, the monarchy has been hesitant to try to reform the religious courts.

"This situation puts Saudi Arabia at odds with the rest of the Arab world, 
where modernizing governments have steadily hemmed in religious courts," 
Dickinson College historian David Commins writes. "It appears as though the 
Saudi rulers lack the confidence to challenge directly the Wahhabi ulama, 
perhaps from a sense that the dynasty's claim to legitimacy is questionable."

And don't expect an end to beheadings soon. The Wahhabi establishment, and its 
harsh vision of criminal law, are deeply embedded in the Saudi state, and seen 
by the monarchy as essential for keeping itself in power. The numbers bear that 
out: according to Amnesty, Saudi Arabia executed more people in 2014 than it 
had in any of the past 3 years.

(source: vox.com)