[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

June 27



LIBYA:

Kadhafi son's new lawyers urge ICC to drop case


New lawyers representing the son of slain Libyan leader Moamer Kadhafi 
announced Monday they will ask the International Criminal Court to quash the 
case against him as he has now been tried and convicted by a Libyan court.

Seif al-Islam, who has been in a 5 1/2-year legal tug-of-war between the ICC 
and Tripoli, is wanted by the tribunal in The Hague to face charges of crimes 
against humanity relating to the bloody repression of the 2011 uprising that 
toppled his father.

Seif, 44, has been held in the northern hilltop stronghold of Zintan since his 
arrest in November 2011.

Last year, in a move heavily criticised by the UN, he was sentenced to death by 
a Libyan court for trying to put down the deadly revolt that saw Moamer 
Kadhafi's 40-year rule end in his own murder.

Now he has appointed his own defence team for the first time, after his earlier 
lawyers were assigned by the ICC.

The new lawyers told journalists in The Hague that they will ask the ICC's 
judges to scrap the case, basing their argument on the so-called principle of 
"double jeopardy".

"The reality is that a trial has taken place. He has been tried and convicted 
in Libya. It's a clear principle of law that one cannot be tried twice for the 
same offence," veteran defence lawyer Karim Khan told a press conference.

"The court will receive a filing from us, the lawyers of Seif al-Islam in due 
course, seeking to declare the case inadmissible," Khan said.

"The ICC should not be a substitute for local courts, but base itself on the 
principle of complementarity," Libyan lawyer Khaled Zaidy added.

- Possible amnesty -

Zaidy last met with Seif in prison in late 2015 and said he is in regular 
contact and receiving instructions from him. "Healthwise he is rather good," he 
said, but Seif had been thinking a lot about the situation in Libya.

Despite the death sentence, Seif may benefit from a proposed general amnesty 
law in Libya that his family had been assured "will be applicable to all Libyan 
nationals without exception," Zaidy said.

Seif and 8 others were sentenced to death by a Tripoli court in July last year. 
They included Kadhafi's former intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi, who saw the 
ICC drop a similar case against him.

Seif was not in court during the Tripoli hearings, but was able to testify via 
videolink from Zintan.

His legal team also insisted he is being held a Libyan government jail run by 
the justice ministry and that rumours he was in the hands of Zintani militias 
were "totally groundless". In the past the militias refused to hand him over to 
Tripoli and the ICC.

Asked whether he believed whether Seif received a fair hearing before being 
handed the death penalty, Khan said the outcome and questions over the Libyan 
process -- which was criticised for not meeting international standards -- were 
"legally irrelevant" to the case before the ICC.

"There's been a trial, there's been a process, there's been a conviction and he 
is still in custody. How on earth is that not double jeopardy?" Khan asked.

The Western-backed overthrow of Kadhafi-'s iron-fisted rule in 2011 plunged 
Libya into chaos, with rival rebel forces seizing as much territory as they 
could.

Now IS jihadist groups have taken advantage of the upheaval to establish a 
presence in the northern African country.

(source: Yahoo News)






ETHIOPIA:

Kidnapped Brit Enters 3rd Year on Ethiopia's Death Row


A British father of 3 who was kidnapped and rendered to Ethiopia will this week 
enter his 3rd year of illegal detention in the country, where he is held under 
sentence of death.

Andargachew 'Andy' Tsege, from London, was kidnapped by Ethiopian forces on the 
23rd of June 2014 as he transited through an airport in Yemen. He was forcibly 
taken to Ethiopia, and has been held in the country ever since. Mr Tsege is a 
prominent figure in Ethiopian opposition politics, and he has previously spoken 
out about human rights abuses in Ethiopia, including at the US Congress and 
European Parliament. He is held under a sentence of death that was imposed in 
absentia in 2009, whilst he was living in London.

Throughout the first 2 years of his detention, the Ethiopian authorities have 
limited Mr Tsege's access to his family and UK consular officials. Last week, 
UK Foreign Office documents relating to the case were made public, showing how 
throughout 2015, Ethiopian officials repeatedly refused to answer British 
requests on Mr Tsege's case. In a record of 1 conversation between Foreign 
Secretary Philip Hammond MP and his Ethiopian counterpart, Dr Tedros Adanhom, 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, made 
earlier this month, that Ethiopia's government had promised 'legal access' for 
Mr Tsege.

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.

Torture of political prisoners is common in Ethiopia, and there are fears for 
Mr Tsege's mental and physical wellbeing.

Commenting, Maya Foa, director of the death penalty team at human rights 
organization Reprieve - which is assisting Mr Tsege's family - said: "It is 
heart-breaking that Andy Tsege, and his young family in London, are today 
forced to mark the 3rd year of his illegal detention in Ethiopia. If the last 2 
years have shown anything in his case, it's that there is no chance of justice 
for Andy while the Ethiopian government has him in their clutches. Enough is 
enough - the Foreign Secretary must demand Andy's immediate return to 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.)






IRAN:

Situation of Iran's Minorities Raised at 6th World Congress Against the Death 
Penalty


ECPM (Ensemble contre la peine de mort) convened the 6th World Congress Against 
the Death Penalty on 21-23 June 2016 in Oslo, Norway, to discuss ways forward 
in the abolition of the death penalty. The event gathered around 1000 
participants (ministers, diplomats, parliamentarians, academics, lawyers and 
members of civil society), among which Ms Monireh Shirani (Balochistan Human 
Rights Group, Sweden) who presented her view on the state of death penalty 
among migrants and minorities in Iran. Baloch, Kurds, Ahwazi Arabs, Azerbaijani 
Turks and Turkmen are being systematically discriminated against and have less 
access to legal resources to defend themselves than the rest of the population, 
which results in minorities being the most threatened by executions. Iran is 
currently among the top countries when it comes to the number of executions in 
the past 5 years.

Below is the speech of Ms Monireh Shirani:

Ethnic minorities have long suffered discrimination as they have been viewed 
with suspicion and considered outsiders or foreign conspirators. The Amnesty 
report for 2015-16 states that "Iran's disadvantaged ethnic groups, Ahwazi 
Arabs, Azerbaijani Turks, Baluchis, Kurds and Turkmen, continued to report that 
the state authorities systematically discriminated against them, particularly 
in employment, housing, access to political office, and the exercise of 
cultural, civil and political rights."

Executions are part of the state policy in dealing with the ethnic minorities, 
to punish any cultural or political act. The large-scale executions of 
political and ideological dissidents have resulted in Iran being in the top 
countries when it comes to number of executions during the last 5 years. Other 
reasons are that the ethnic minorities also have less access to the legal 
resources needed to defend themselves due to a discriminatory system, poverty, 
marginalization and living in militarized zone.

There is a clear over representation of the Ahwazi arabs, Baloch and Kurds on 
the death row and in executions. Iran executed nearly 1000 prisoners last year, 
the majority of these executions were prisoners' sentence to death for 
drug-related offenses. Under Iran's current drug laws possession of 30 grams of 
heroin or cocaine would qualify for the death penalty.

Iran views these number as a great victory and defends its acts because they 
claim that they are in a war on drugs. Some of those who were convicted for 
drug related offenses were actually political dissidents. In Balochistan entire 
adult male populations from singled out villages have been executed, the regime 
fully admit to this and refers to the war on drugs and drug trafficking as 
crimes which have to be met with mass execution. Some of them were executed 
without trials others had trials conducted behind closed doors, before biased 
judges and in absence of legal representations.

One can wonder how this is possible on a large scale.

Well, charges of act on national security and drug related offenses, are among 
the charges routinely used on ethnic minorities, fall within the jurisdiction 
of the Revolutionary court which is one for the strictest Judicial bodies.

The Revolutionary court consists of essentially closed meetings, the right of 
defense is ignored. The accused is not informed of his or her right to adequate 
defense. The right to assistance of interpretation of the proceedings in his or 
her mother tongue as Farsi is not the mother tongue of the ethnic minorities 
not given.

The family is prohibited to participate in the deliberations of the case. The 
courts is by law obliged to inform the accused of the verdict by sending a copy 
of the decision to his place of residence and from that time there is a 20 day 
appeal possibility. The Revolutionary court fails to follow its legal 
obligations and violates the accused's rights, because they don't send a copy, 
the family is not notified in time.

The accused are usually moved to different locations, in different regions as a 
strategy to isolate the accused. This places a challenge on the prisoner 
because it makes it hard for the family to visit and give adequate support.

In Iran there are thousands of minors in prison, often sentenced to death while 
underage and executed when coming to age. On the 27th of April Mohammad 
Sanchouli 22 years old was executed in Balochistan. He was arrested and 
convicted when he was 17 years old and spent 5 years in prison.

The obstacles confronted by minorities facing the death penalty is on the 
individual level impossible to tackle. The strategies and the ambiguity of the 
system is difficult for the individual and his/her family to overcome. Rather 
than finding reasonable evidence for the commission of a crime, judges 
generally rely on confessions, which have often been coerced through physical 
and psychological torture. Iranian television continue to broadcast 
self-incriminating testimonies of ethnic minority detainees even before their 
opening trial, undermining their fundamental rights of defendants to be 
considered innocent until proven guilty.

Last year in Ahwaz 5 prisoners were arrested in April and on in June they were 
brought in front of state TV by the Ministry of Information to make public 
confessions. These public confessions are frequent used when lack of evidence. 
For example in 2012 in Balochistan ten people were arrested for an 
assassination.

Confessions were broadcast on state TV. Some of them received long sentenced 
others were sentenced to death. A few years after the security forces arrested 
another 18 people for the same crime for which the people in 2012 had been 
tried and convicted for.

Most of the minority prisoners have been arbitrary arrested. We have cases of 
security forces raiding homes and arresting people without warrants. In Ahwaz 
last year more than 75 people were arrested after a demonstration and for 
months their whereabouts were unknown to their families.

"Waging war against God" (Moharebeh) enmity against God is one of the leading 
charges used by the Iranian regime to justify the inhuman executions of ethnic 
minorities groups in Iran. Other common charges against minorities sentences to 
death are charges of corruption on earth (Mofsid fil-arz), drug related 
offences and acts against national security. Another vulnerable group is 
religious minorities such as the Bahai who are also usually charged with 
espionage and acts against national security.

A few weeks ago, the Iranian government executed 5 Kurdish prisoners in the 
northwestern city of Urmia. They were hung publicly on charges of "conspiring 
against the Islamic Republic of Iran". They were human rights activists who 
used to document violations by security forces against civilians in the Kurdish 
city of Urmia. The regime is quick to state examples by using public hangings 
to discourage any form of activity in the regions. Many of these hangings take 
up to 20 minutes, a slow and painful death. The body is often left for a time 
before removed from the scene.

We the diaspora and the civil society living outside Iran depend on the United 
Nations as a tool to challenge the ongoing oppression in Iran. The UN's office 
on drugs and crime, the anti-drug agency has a multi-million dollar funding 
package, which includes EU money, for Iran's counter narcotics trafficking 
program. Iran's war on drugs have not resulted in the population being less 
addicted to drugs but rather resulted in mass executions of ethnic minorities. 
The international community needs to raise concern over the lack of the 
administration of justice in this war on drugs.

This money should be conditional and the UN should demand that the capital 
punishment for drug related offense not be used, put pressure on the country to 
give the accused a fair trial and access to judicial system. The UN should at 
least demand that the Special rapporteurs be given access to the country as a 
condition.

The strategy is to continue to work against the death penalty. To work with 
wide networks of law makers, lawyers, NGO's and activists to create new 
strategies towards universal abolition of the death penalty.

Other tactics to challenge the status quo is Social media and media. Iran does 
not expose its execution records, it's quite hard to obtain full court records. 
Bridging the information gap is key. In Zahedan prison in April 8 men were 
executed. We still don't know the full identity of five of them. The civil 
society outside as well as in side Iran plays an important role in creating 
records and bring the information out. The state TV often dehumanize ethnic 
minorities in national media, promoting a discourse of uncivilized, barbaric, 
drug lord and illiterate people living in dangerous areas. People in the 
central part never see the regions of the minorities and so the only 
information that they have of us is the state's portrayal. That's why media 
coverage to is important so that the state narrative can be challenged.

(source: unpo.org)