[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

June 23



INDIA:

Prez rejects mercy plea of 2 convicts of Jharkhand massacre


The mercy plea of 2 convicts, who killed 8 members of a family including a 
physically disabled youth in Jharkhand nearly 9 years ago, has been rejected by 
President Pranab Mukherjee.

The President has rejected the plea of the convicts-- Mofil Khan and Mobarak 
Khan, officials said today. The duo had in June 2007 killed Haneef Khan with 
sharp-edged weapons when he was offering prayers at a mosque in Makandu village 
under Lohardaga district in the state. After killing him, they murdered his 
wife and his 6 sons which included the disabled youth. A case was registered by 
the local police against Mofil and Mobarak and 2 other assailants. Following 
the probe, a local court there had given death sentence to all the accused. 
However, the Jharkhand High Court had upheld death penalty to Mofil and Mubarak 
and modified the sentence to life term for the 2 others.

The Supreme Court in its final judgement in October 2014 also upheld the death 
penalty given to the convicts. A mercy petition was then filed before the 
President through the Home Ministry. The plea, which was received in December 
last year at the Presidents secretariat, seeking mercy has been rejected by 
Mukherjee, they said.

After taking over as the President in July 2012, Mukherjee has rejected 26 
mercy pleas so far including those of 26/11 terror case convict Ajmal Kasab and 
1993 blast case convict Yakub Memon. The death sentence in 2 cases has been 
commuted to life by the President. 2 mercy petitions of Jeetendra Gehlaut alias 
Jeetu, convicted for killing 5 women and 2 children during a robbery in 
Maharashtra, and Shabnam, who was convicted for killing 7 members of her family 
at Amroha in Uttar Pradesh, are pending with the President.

(source: India Today)






JAPAN:

Death penalty sought for man over deaths of 2 women


Prosecutors sought the death penalty Wednesday at the Nagoya District Court for 
a man charged with murdering a woman in 2011, and causing his girlfriend's 
death in 2009.

The death penalty was sought for Keiji Hayashi, 43, in a lay judge trial over 
the murder of restaurant worker Madoka Morioka, 27, in Aichi Prefecture in 
central Japan in November 2011, and causing his girlfriend Eri Asano, 26, to 
kill herself in July 2009.

"The crimes are extremely atrocious as he used the victims to gratify his 
desire and did not treat (each of) them as a person," the prosecutors said. 
Hayashi is charged with murder, injury resulting in death and other charges.

The court is slated to hand down its ruling on July 15.

According to the indictment, Hayashi allegedly murdered Morioka by strangling 
her to death with his hands because he believed she was obstructing him from 
becoming intimate with another female worker at the restaurant where Morioka 
worked. He then abandoned Morioka's body in Lake Kuzuryu in Fukui Prefecture, 
also in central Japan.

Hayashi is also charged with compelling Asano to strangle herself with a chain 
at his home in Gifu Prefecture. Asano died of suffocation, the indictment said.

The defense counsel has accepted almost all the charges in the indictment, but 
said Asano strangled herself "of her own will."

The prosecutors said Hayashi treated his girlfriend "like a slave," and because 
he had such strong control over her, he did not leave her with any option other 
than strangling herself.

Defense lawyers have also argued that the defendant and his accomplice, 
Tomoyuki Watanabe, 38, who is serving a 14-year prison sentence for murdering 
Morioka, had planned the murder of Morioka together. But Watanabe has testified 
that Hayashi alone planned the murder and he could not refuse to participate 
because he thought Hayashi would kill him.

(source: Japan Today)






CHINA:

port: China still harvesting organs from prisoners at a massive scale


A new report claims that China is still engaged in the widespread and 
systematic harvesting of organs from prisoners, and says that people whose 
views conflict with the ruling Chinese Communist Party are being murdered for 
their organs.

The report -- by former Canadian lawmaker David Kilgour, human rights lawyer 
David Matas, and journalist Ethan Gutmann -- collates publicly reported figures 
from hospitals across China to show what they claim is a massive discrepancy 
between official figures for the number of transplants carried out throughout 
the country.

They blame the Chinese government, the Communist Party, the health system, 
doctors and hospitals for being complicit.

"The (Communist Party) says the total number of legal transplants is about 
10,000 per year. But we can easily surpass the official Chinese figure just by 
looking at the two or three biggest hospitals," Matas said in a statement.

The report estimates that 60,000 to 100,000 organs are transplanted each year 
in Chinese hospitals.

According to the report, that gap is made up of executed prisoners, many of 
them prisoners of conscience locked up for their religious or political 
beliefs. China does not report its total number of executions, which it regards 
as a secret.

The report's findings stand in stark contrast to Beijing's claim that, since 
the beginning of 2015, China has moved from almost completely relying on organs 
from prisoners to the "largest voluntary organ donation system in Asia."

At a regular press conference Thursday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman 
Hua Chunying said China has "strict laws and regulations on this issue."

"As for the testimony and the published report, I want to say that such stories 
about forced organ harvesting in China are imaginary and baseless -- they 
don't have any factual foundation," she said.

The National Health and Family Planning Commission, which oversees organ 
donations in China, did not respond to a request for comment for this piece.

Secret transplants

According to the report, thousands of people are being executed in China in 
secret and their organs harvested for use in transplant operations.

So who is being killed? The authors say mainly imprisoned religious and ethnic 
minorities, including Uyghurs, Tibetans, underground Christians, and 
practitioners of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.

While much of China's organ transplant system is kept secret, official figures 
show that 2,766 volunteers donated organs in 2015, with 7,785 large organs 
acquired.

Official figures put the number of transplant operations at around 10,000 a 
year, which the report disputes.

The authors point to publicly available statements and records released by 
hospitals across China claiming they carried out thousands of transplant 
annually, and interviews with and official biographies of individual doctors 
who claim to have carried out thousands of transplant operations during their 
careers.

"Simply by adding up a handful of the hospitals that have been profiled in this 
(report), it's easy to come up with higher annual transplant volume figures 
than 10,000," the authors write.

According to official statistics, there are more than 100 hospitals in China 
approved to carry out organ transplant operations. But the report states the 
authors have "verified and confirmed 712 hospitals which carry out liver and 
kidney transplants," and claims the number of actual transplants could be 
hundreds of thousands larger than China reports.

'Ghoulish and inhumane practice'

The apparent gap in official transplant figures, the report claims, is filled 
by prisoners of conscience.

According to Amnesty International, "tens of thousands of Falun Gong 
practitioners have been arbitrarily detained" since the government launched a 
crackdown on the practice in 1999.

China regards Falun Gong as a "cult" and claims followers engage in "anti-China 
political activities."

"The government considers Falun Gong a threat to its power, and has detained, 
imprisoned and tortured its followers," says Maya Wang, China researcher for 
Human Rights Watch.

The report says detained Falun Gong practitioners were forced to have blood 
tests and medical exams. Those test results were placed in a database of living 
organ sources so quick organ matches could be made, the authors claim.

This massive supply of organs served to benefit hospitals and doctors, making 
for an ever growing industry.

The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee is scheduled to hear testimony from 
the report's authors on Thursday.

"China has been perpetuating perhaps some of the most gruesome and egregious 
human rights violations against the Falun Gong and other prisoners of 
conscience, yet has hardly faced any criticism, let alone sanctions, for these 
abuses," said Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, former chair of the U.S. 
House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a statement released online.

"The regime's ghoulish and inhumane practice of robbing individuals of their 
freedom, throwing them in labor camps or prisons, and then executing them and 
harvesting their organs for transplants is beyond the pale of comprehension and 
must be opposed universally and ended unconditionally."

'Good intentions'

For decades, Chinese officials strenuously denied that they harvested organs 
from prisoners, calling claims to the contrary "vicious slander."

Finally in 2005, officials admitted that the practice took place and promised 
to reform it.

5 years later however, Huang Jiefu, director of the China Organ Donation 
Committee, told medical journal The Lancet that more than 90% of transplant 
organs still came from executed prisoners.

China carries out more executions annually than the rest of the world put 
together, at least 2,400 in 2014, according to Death Penalty Worldwide. 
Official Chinese figures are not reported.

In late 2014, China announced that it would switch to a completely voluntary 
donation-based system.

This pronouncement was greeted with great skepticism however, given that 
between 2012 and 2013, only around 1,400 people signed up to donate (compared 
to the more than 300,000 in need of organ transplants every year).

Since then, the government has seen limited success in getting people to sign 
up to the national register.

One 86-year-old woman, surnamed Zhou, told CNN she had wanted to donate her 
organs in 1996 but at the time her local Red Cross chapter had never heard of 
someone doing so.

"Since I wasn't able to have a medical career myself, I want to make a 
contribution after I die," she said.

Zhou said that while her family was mostly supportive of her decision, "in 
China, the conventional wisdom is that it's improper to mutilate a body when 
someone is dead."

While people like Zhou have stepped forward to fill the gap left by prisoners, 
experts warn that there is nothing to stop those condemned to be executed from 
also "volunteering," and regulations legalizing the use of prisoners' organs 
remain in force.

The 2014 announcement "is only at best a statement of good intentions but has 
no force of law," the medical journal BMJ said.

The phasing out of executed prisoners' organs is a "semantic trick," Professor 
Li Huige of Johannes Gutenberg University said in a recent report commissioned 
by the European Parliament.

Why China will struggle to end organ harvesting from executed prisoners?

He pointed to statements by Huang to Chinese state media that "death row 
prisoners are also citizens."

"If (they) are willing to atone for their crime by donating organs, they should 
be encouraged," Huang told People's Daily.

By redefining prisoners as regular citizens, Li says, "China's national organ 
donation system may be abused for the whitewashing of organs from both death 
row prisoners and prisoners of conscience."

In an open letter to the Lancet, 5 doctors wrote that "China is still using 
death row inmates' organs. The only difference is that these organs are now 
been classified as citizens' voluntarily donated organs."

Huang did not respond to a request for comment. Speaking to the New York Times, 
he said his comments had been "distorted" and were not in keeping with 
government policy.

(source: CNN)






UNITED KINGDOM:

Foreign Office Emails Cast Doubt on 'Legal Access' for Death-row Brit


Newly-released documents show how the Ethiopian authorities repeatedly misled 
Foreign Office staff attempting to help a British man who was kidnapped and 
rendered to Ethiopia two years ago. Internal Foreign Office emails and 
documents, obtained by human rights organisation Reprieve, show that throughout 
the last year, Ethiopian officials repeatedly obstructed and frustrated the 
efforts of British government staff who were seeking to assist Andargachew 
'Andy' Tsege.

Mr Tsege, a British father of three from London, was kidnapped by Ethiopian 
forces and taken forcibly to Ethiopia on 23rd June 2014. Mr Tsege is a 
prominent figure in Ethiopian opposition politics, and he is being held under a 
sentence of death that was imposed in absentia in 2009, whilst he was living in 
London. In his 2 years' of detention, the Ethiopian authorities have severely 
limited his access to his family, and UK consular officials. Torture of 
political prisoners is common in Ethiopia, and there are fears for his mental 
and physical wellbeing.

In the Foreign Office documents - which date from throughout 2015 - Ethiopian 
officials repeatedly refused to confirm where Mr Tsege was being held, 
cancelling planned consular visits, and failing to answer basic questions over 
the legal basis for his detention. In a record of a conversation between 
Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond MP and his Ethiopian counterpart, Dr Tedros 
Adanhom on 24th June 2015 - 1 year after Mr Tsege's kidnap - Mr Hammond 
complained about Ethiopia's "repeated failure to deliver on our basic 
requests", saying "people were asking why we had a substantial bilateral 
relationship but were not able to resolve this".

The documents also show that Ethiopian officials have repeatedly told UK 
diplomats that there is no possibility of a legal process for Mr Tsege in 
Ethiopia - raising serious doubts over an announcement by Mr Hammond that 
Ethiopia has now promised 'legal access' for Mr Tsege, made earlier this month.

According to the documents, when asked by the Foreign Office about Mr Tsege's 
legal rights in May last year, the Ethiopian Foreign Minister insisted that 
there was "no case" for a lawyer, saying "the legal process ... was complete 
... what was the need for a lawyer?" In July that year, the Ethiopian Prime 
Minister confirmed to the UK Secretary of State for International Development 
that "there was no appeal process" for Mr Tsege in Ethiopia, a fact later 
repeated by the Ethiopian Foreign Minister.

Reprieve has urged the Foreign Office to request Mr Tsege's release, and his 
return to the UK - a call that has already been made by the UN Working Group on 
Arbitrary Detention, the European Parliament, and several MPs.

Commenting, Maya Foa, director of the death penalty team at Reprieve, said: 
"Throughout Andy's 2-year ordeal, Ethiopian officials have repeatedly run rings 
around the Foreign Office - making and breaking the most basic of assurances, 
and insisting, again and again, that Andy has no legal rights in Ethiopia. By 
relying on the latest empty promise of 'legal access', Philip Hammond is only 
compounding the abuses Andy has suffered in illegal Ethiopian detention. Enough 
is enough - the Foreign Secretary must call for Andy's release, so he can 
return to his family in the UK."

(source: 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. 
commondreams.org)






GLOBAL:

The 6th UNGA Resolution for a Moratorium on Use of the Death Penalty


ORGANISERS Hands off Cain, World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, Amnesty 
International On 18 December 2014, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) reaffirmed 
its broad support for the Moratorium on Use of the Death Penalty resolution for 
the 5th time since 2007.

Resolution A/ RES/69/186 was passed with a record 117 votes in favour, 38 
against, 34 abstentions and 4 absent.

In December 2016, a new resolution will be put to the vote and the abolitionist 
movement faces a major challenge.

(source: radioradicale.it)