[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

February 10



VIETNAM:

Australian detained in Vietnam, Chau Van Kham, investigated for crime that 
carries death penalty



When Chau Van Kham abruptly stopped responding to messages on a trip to Vietnam 
in January, his prolonged silence led to a seeping dread.

His family, based in Australia and the UK, feared he had been spirited away.

Mr Chau, 69, is an Australian citizen and retired small businessman from Sydney 
who fled Vietnam by boat in 1982. He once fought alongside US troops during the 
Vietnam War and is a long-time pro-democracy and human rights activist.

It is a devotion that led him to cross from Cambodia into Vietnamese territory 
in what would prove to be an ill-fated "fact-finding" mission.

"I was most worried about him disappearing," his son Dennis Chau, 29, told the 
ABC from the United Kingdom.

"[My mum] always tries to be strong … but I can tell how she's breaking down."

Mr Chau was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City on January 15 after meeting with a 
civil society activist.

Now, he is under investigation for alleged activities against Vietnam's 
communist Government — an offence that can carry the death penalty in the most 
serious cases.

He is also being denied access to a lawyer.

Dennis said the news his father had been detained, however distressing, was a 
slight relief as at least he hadn't disappeared.

Mr Chau's family suspected he was on some kind of Government watch list for his 
pro-democracy activities.

In fact, it was something they used to joke about, when the concept of arrest 
was inconceivable.

"I just didn't imagine it would ever happen — I was shocked," Dennis said.

In a statement, Vietnam's Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesman Le Thi Thu Hang 
confirmed that "Chau Van Kham is currently detained and under investigation for 
violating Vietnamese laws", but declined to specify which laws had been 
breached.

Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) told the ABC it was 
providing consular assistance to an Australian man detained in Vietnam, but for 
privacy reasons was unable to provide further details.

'Operations to overthrow the Government'

But a DFAT report to the family following Mr Chau's sole consular visit on 
January 28, seen by the ABC, reveals the Australian retiree is being 
investigated under Article 109 — which refers to alleged operations to 
overthrow the Government.

Nestled between "high treason" and "espionage" in Vietnam's criminal code, 
Article 109 says that a person who joins an organisation that acts against the 
people's Government can be punished with 12 to 20 years behind bars, life 
imprisonment or death.

Suspected accomplices face lesser penalties, ranging from 12 months to 12 years 
in prison.

Mr Chau is also being investigated for allegedly breaching Article 341, which 
pertains to fabricating documents. Vietnamese authorities allege he used a fake 
Vietnamese identity card to enter the country.

As Mr Chau's alleged crimes fall under national security breaches, he will be 
denied legal representation until after the investigation is already complete 
in late May, purportedly "to protect the secrecy" of the process.

Mr Chau was videotaped during the consular visit, prompting concerns that he 
wouldn't be able to speak freely with Australian officials.

The family is also concerned about his ongoing health issues, including high 
cholesterol and prostatitis.

Dennis said he and his family were grappling with the reality of having their 
father incarcerated under a judicial system that seems so far removed from 
Australia's.

"It's not a law system that you're used to. You don't know what to expect … [is 
he] going to be mistreated in jail?" Dennis said.

"If he does eventually come home, is he going to be the same? Or is he going to 
be frail or broken? I just don't know."

Fleeing war, facing prison

In a YouTube clip, Mr Chau shares his experience of surviving the 1968 Tet 
offensive as a 19-year-old student in Hue, where thousands of civilians were 
killed en masse by the Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces.

But to his sons, Mr Chau is simply known as dad.

Arriving on Australian shores in 1982, Mr Chau became a citizen the following 
year. He met his wife, Trang, who came to Australia in 1983.

They married in 1986 and had 2 sons, Daniel, 31, and Dennis, 29.

The family lived above the Sydney laundry shop Mr Chau ran until he opened a 
bakery.

"When he came to Australia, he thought it was all about opportunities he 
wouldn't get in Vietnam," Dennis said.

"He was always working ridiculously long hours, and it was always a bit of a 
struggle."

But weekends were for spending time with his sons — taking them to the beach, 
playing tennis and going swimming.

In his retirement, Mr Chau became an active member of Viet Tan, a group branded 
a "terrorist force" and outlawed in Vietnam.

But the chairman Do Hoang Diem rejected any suggestion of terrorism, saying the 
group aims "to promote democracy and human rights in Vietnam through 
non-violent civic action".

He said Vietnam had "unleashed a severe crack down on dissidents" in the past 
three years and Mr Chau was gathering on-the-ground information about its 
impact.

"When facing such a lawless regime, dissidents and activists on their black 
list have no choice but to resort to finding other ways to enter Vietnam," he 
said.

In a statement, Viet Tan said the Vietnamese Government often used arbitrary 
detention and "fabricated accusations to defame" the group, adding that Mr Chau 
had been "attacked" in a state-owned media outlet and his address had been 
published as "a tactic to intimidate his family".

"Chau Van Kham has undoubtedly faced emotional duress and even forced 
confession," it said.

Amnesty International estimates there are more than 100 prisoners of conscience 
in jail in Vietnam today, many of whom are slapped with lengthy prison terms 
after "farcical trials".

Vietnam has "a terrible record of targeting people who peacefully say what they 
think", an Amnesty spokesperson told the ABC in a statement.

"A simple meeting or even a Facebook post could land you years in jail."

Sentences are often pre-determined before trial for those cast as "enemies of 
the state" and "torture is often used by interrogators".

Reflecting on his father's activism, Dennis said he often asked why he 
continued to advocate for human rights and democracy in a country where he no 
longer lived.

His father told him it was because people don't have basic freedoms in Vietnam.

"I think that motivates him to do it. He's always been very, very passionate 
about it," Dennis said.

"He's always put other people ahead of himself."

(source: abc.net.au)








INDIA:

72 die from tainted liquor in India



The number of people who died after drinking illegally brewed alcohol in 
northern India rose to 72 Saturday as authorities began a crackdown and 
suspended police and officials.

At least 64 people had died in Saharanpur and Haridwar, adjoining districts of 
Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand states, after drinking the poisonous liquor.

Eight more deaths, blamed on tainted liquor, were reported in Kushinagar 
district, also in Uttar Pradesh, regional official BD Gupta said.

In Saharanpur district, the death toll climbed from 16 to 36, top 
administrative official Alok Pandey said. The villagers drank the tainted 
liquor Thursday.

The liquor was suspected of being laced with methanol.

The Saharanpur police, who are working on the assumption that the alcohol may 
have come from the same source, arrested 30 people, many of them bootleggers. 
They seized more than 2,000 pints of tainted liquor in raids.

Authorities in the region also suspended over 30 officials, including 10 
policemen, on charges of negligence or collusion in the illicit trade.

They said they would demand death penalty for those involved in the illicit 
trade once the case reaches court.

Later Saturday, authorities in both states announced compensation of $2,800 
each to the relatives of those killed.

An average of 1,000 people, mostly from poorer sections of society, die in 
India each year after consuming illegally brewed alcohol, according to the 
National Crime Records Bureau.

The liquor is usually made with poor-quality ingredients and sometimes mixed 
with industrial alcohol and toxic substances.

(source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur)








PAKISTAN:

CONDEMNED UNHEARD: ON DEATH ROW ABROAD----Today, over 11,000 Pakistanis - many 
of them migrants in search of better opportunities - are detained in jails 
abroad.



While successive governments have looked towards remittances to boost the 
economy, these tales capture the agony and helplessness of those who have had a 
run-in with the law in a foreign country.

Wrapped in a green hospital gown, a plastic tube inserted into his nostrils, 
Zulfiqar Ali knew that his last days were upon him. He had arrived in Batu 
Prison on Nusakambangan Island — darkly referred to as ‘Execution Island’ by 
the Javanese — with dim prospects of survival. In May 2018, his 
wan-complexioned face seemed expressionless, lying still and frozen on the 
hospital bed.

Spending 13 years on death row had left Ali stationed in perennial limbo since 
2004, unsure about the passage of time. In 2016, Indonesia had ordered Ali to 
face death by a firing squad after convicting him of drug possession, despite a 
dearth of evidence. Back then, with a mere 72 hours remaining until Ali faced 
his executioners, Pakistan’s then prime minister Nawaz Sharif had directly 
intervened, taking the rare step of imploring the Indonesian government to 
grant clemency to a Pakistani migrant worker.

However, almost two years later, there was no grand intercession by the 
government of Pakistan when Ali’s health began to fail. At 54 years old, Ali 
heaved his last breath, succumbing to the last stages of liver cancer in the 
intensive care unit of the jail’s hospital. Despite the plea by the Pakistani 
prime minister, his name was still firmly lodged in Indonesia’s database of 
drug convicts when he died.

In 2001, Ali had left behind work in a textile mill on the plains of Punjab, 
Pakistan’s largest and most fertile province, and arrived in Jakarta to stake 
out a new fortune. He had settled down, married an Indonesian woman named Siti, 
and fathered five children. By all accounts, his life was on the upswing, 
propelled forward by a job as a marketing manager at a friend’s company. In his 
free time, he tended to a side business, supplying Islamic garments 
manufactured in countries such as Pakistan to the Indonesian market. Fortune 
seemed to favour him in these early days, and he was able to acquire three 
homes spread between Pakistan and Indonesia.

Despite his rapidly increasing prosperity and blossoming familial roots in 
Indonesia, Ali’s social and cultural ties to the country were still somewhat 
tenuous. His command of the Bahasa Indonesian language remained weak, and he 
largely fraternised with South Asians. It was through these circles that he 
made the ill-fated acquaintance of an Indian migrant worker named Gurdip Singh 
in Jakarta.

In November 2004, this connection would cost him gravely when Singh was stopped 
by Indonesian authorities at Jakarta’s main international airport for carrying 
300 grammes of heroin, a crime punishable by death in the country.

At the time, Ali, then 38, was staying at his house in Bogor, enjoying the 
cooler temperatures of a city set against the once-volcanic Mount Salak. Ali 
had no awareness of Singh’s movements at the airport, nor of the drugs he had 
in his possession, his lawyers say. That did not impact the ensuing events. 
Policemen soon knocked on Ali’s door in Bogor and handcuffed him, claiming that 
his name had surfaced during their questioning of Singh. The police believed he 
was involved in the drug smuggling.

Despite proclaiming his innocence, Ali was hauled away by officials to an 
unknown house, where he was beaten by the police over three days to extract a 
confession. During the thrashings, the police — who had entered Ali’s home 
without a warrant — said they would kill him if he did not sign the confession 
paper. Fearful of what might result if he did not assent to their demand, Ali 
placed his signature on the paper, effectively signing his life away.

He ended up spending 17 days at a police hospital for kidney and stomach 
surgery. According to Ali’s lawyers, he never recovered from some of the 
injuries sustained during the torture.

Although Ali was alarmed at Singh’s accusation that he was involved in drug 
smuggling, there was one scrap of news that brightened his mood: He learned 
that in a court affidavit, Singh had recanted his earlier statements that the 
drugs were Ali’s, confessing that the police had encouraged him to list someone 
else’s name in order to reduce his own punishment.

However, despite Singh’s statement, Ali was not freed; he still had to stand 
trial. Ali stumbled through the courtroom proceedings with a dim grasp of the 
Bahasa Indonesian and English being spoken, almost entirely reliant on his 
interpreter’s translations. His mother tongue was Urdu, and both English and 
Bahasa Indonesian were second languages Ali had little limited mastery of. 
Adding to his problems was the fact that he did not have a lawyer. A month 
after his trial had started in 2005, he received a lawyer, but by then it was 
too late. Despite a lack of evidence showing that Ali had brought any drugs to 
Indonesia, the Tangerang District Court sentenced him to death in June 2005.

Ali was told that the punishment would be execution, but he could serve a 
lesser punishment of 10 to 15 years in prison if he simply paid a 400 million 
Indonesian rupiah bribe, equivalent to US$27,762 at the time. Ali refused to 
pay the extortionate sum, declaring himself innocent.

Ali filed an appeal 2 months later which was rejected the following year. 
Despite the setback, he nonetheless pursued his case all the way to the Supreme 
Court, which struck down his request to overturn the punishment in 2008, 
upholding his original death sentence.

In 2010, after news surfaced that Ali faced trial without a lawyer and with 
subpar translation assistance, Indonesia’s ex-president Susilo Bambang 
Yudhoyono ordered an inquiry into Ali’s case. The inquiry declared that Ali was 
innocent and, going 1 step further, acknowledged that he had suffered custodial 
abuse at the hands of the police. Despite this good news, it did not change 
Ali’s fate — the inquiry’s findings never made their way into the courtroom 
proceedings.

In April 2013, Ali filed a case review to re-examine the case. Noting that Ali 
had no prior drug history or convictions, lawyers argued that his case had 
multiple deficiencies — not only had he been operating without a proper 
interpreter, there was no evidence that he had committed the crime, a 
particularly egregious oversight in light of the severity of the punishment.

However, his case review was rejected on unknown grounds and, in July 2016, Ali 
received the dreaded order: in 72 hours, the Indonesians would execute him by 
firing squad. By August, the Justice Project Pakistan (JPP), an NGO assisting 
Pakistanis on death row, launched a vigorous media campaign that drew attention 
to Ali’s case. Through the JPP’s efforts, the case reached the highest echelons 
of power in Pakistan, prompting then prime minister Nawaz Sharif to call upon 
Indonesia to halt the execution.

The Indonesians responded favourably, swiftly placing a stay on the execution. 
However, they did not acquit him of the charges and he still faced the death 
penalty at a later date. Part of the problem was that the Tangerang District 
Court still deemed Ali’s confession — obtained through police torture — valid 
in the court of law. His lawyers were outraged; not only were there no drugs 
found on Ali when he was taken by the police, the relatively minor quantity of 
heroin Singh had been carrying when he implicated Ali simply did not match the 
gravity of the punishment. In other cases, heroin possession of far smaller 
quantities had yielded milder punishments.

Complicating matters was Ali’s health which, by December 2017, had deteriorated 
entirely. That month, Ali’s physician informed him that he was suffering from 
stage-4 terminal liver cancer which doctors had no cure for.

The likelihood of him dying, either on death row or in the hospital, was now 
almost a foregone conclusion.

His lawyers pleaded with the Indonesian government to grant him clemency and 
release him for medical reasons, repeatedly underlining the fact that 
authorities had no evidence that Ali had carried heroin into Indonesia in the 
first place.

Importantly, Ali gravely needed a liver transplant, though the operation was 
expected to fail. Mounting medical costs threatened his physical health, as 
doctors discovered additional illnesses ranging from cirrhosis of the liver to 
diabetes. To pay the bills, Ali and his family sold his houses, and eventually 
Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs paid more than US$37,000 to cover his 
medical bills.

This did not solve the larger imbroglio. Medical staff told Ali that at best, 
he only had a few months to live, and those would likely be spent in a jail 
hospital.

A faint hope arose in January 2018, as an opportunity for an appeal opened up. 
The country’s highest authority, the Indonesian president, was one of the few 
officials empowered to pardon a prisoner, and Indonesian president Joko Widodo 
was making a rare state visit to Pakistan, during which he planned to sign 
memoranda of understanding with his Pakistani counterpart and even address the 
parliament in Islamabad.

According to then foreign minister Khawaja Asif, during Widodo’s 
highly-publicised meeting with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, the prime 
minister directly implored Widodo to release Ali on medical grounds.

For its part, the JPP, the main NGO working on Ali’s case, swiftly seized the 
opportunity to organize a media campaign around Zulfiqar Ali’s case. The 
appeals seemed to work; Widodo himself promised to reconsider the case during 
his visit, a drastic reversal from a man who had once told Indonesian media he 
would never grant clemency requests for drug trafficking.

Widodo ‘had declared war against drug traffickers, pointing to the increasing 
number of drug abuse victims,’ said Justice Minister Yasonna. ‘[He] was not 
planning to abolish capital punishment anytime soon, particularly in cases of 
drug trafficking,’ according to a December 2014 press release.

Yet Widodo’s promise remained unfulfilled. This might have owed partly to the 
fact that it was never followed up on by Pakistan’s own foreign ministry, says 
Rimmel Mohydin, the former head of communications at the JPP.

Today, more than 11,000 Pakistanis are detained in jails around the world, many 
being migrants grasping at economic opportunities abroad to escape political 
and financial instability at home. The country lacks a consular protection 
policy for citizens detained abroad, a fact that has major ramifications for 
migrant workers.

Typically, a consular protection policy establishes a range of services to 
citizens facing distress or detention abroad, ranging from legal representation 
to visits to jails by consular staff. “It appears that the government has 
adopted a policy of ‘no policy’ on overseas Pakistanis,” said Lahore High 
Court’s chief justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah, during a 2017 court hearing of a 
lawsuit filed by the families of migrant workers on death row.

In Ali’s case, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was alerted by the JPP to his 
ordeal. Given his ill health, both the NGO and his family asked Indonesia to 
repatriate Ali, but this never materialised. According to the JPP, the 
Pakistani government’s negligence played a role in Ali’s death in Indonesia. 
Under Article 4(1) of the Pakistani constitution, the government holds a 
responsibility to protect citizens, which the foreign ministry patently failed 
to carry out by not advocating for Ali’s repatriation.

Indeed, although the interventions of both prime ministers Abbasi and Sharif 
demonstrated Pakistan’s capacity to impact how its migrant workers fare abroad, 
this pressure is rarely exerted. Instead, inaction by government institutions, 
and particularly Pakistan’s foreign service, is far more typical.

Like Zulfiqar Ali, Abu Zar was a Pakistani migrant waiting for a response that 
never came from his government. In February 2012, Abu Zar was excited for his 
first trip home to Pakistan in 2 years, paid for by the Al-Sagheer taxi company 
that employed him in Saudi Arabia. His days were spent driving for wages much 
higher than he could command back home in Pakistan’s Bhakkar district, an 
expanse of verdant land situated in Punjab.

After Abu Zar’s customary trip home that year, which involved greeting 
relatives, lavishing them with gifts, and enjoying his own joyful reprieve from 
the toil of driving, Abu Zar’s family drove him nearly 5 hours north to 
Islamabad airport. There, they embraced him for the final farewell.

After the routine goodbyes, the family expected Abu Zar to immediately embark 
on the plane for the onward journey. However, unbeknownst to them, an old 
colleague from Al-Sagheer had contacted Abu Zar, seeking help with a mundane 
task. The request was simple enough: Abu Zar was asked to carry an extra 
luggage item on behalf of the colleague, to be delivered to family in Saudi 
Arabia. Abu Zar agreed without asking what was inside the bag.

Indeed, for migrant workers detained on death row, the Saudi justice system 
often seems cruelly capricious. Sometimes detainees believe their punishment 
will span a fixed interval of time, only to realise the judges have arbitrarily 
modified the sentencing. “They will give you a punishment of 15 years 
imprisonment, and after five years they can change this and give you capital 
punishment,” Ahmed says.

Abu Zar proceeded through passport check and the security gate without any 
problems. At the time, he was distracted by thoughts of his family — he knew he 
wouldn’t see them for another year or 2.

When the plane descended at Jeddah airport, however, Abu Zar’s situation 
changed radically. Almost immediately after landing, Saudi airport security 
informed him that they had discovered drugs in his luggage. Unbeknownst to him, 
the tyres and handle of the bag he had taken from his colleague were lined with 
illicit narcotics.

The response was swift: Abu Zar was arrested for drug possession and 
immediately transported to Briman prison in Saudi Arabia’s western quarter. For 
at least 15 days, none of Abu Zar’s family members in Pakistan were notified 
about his whereabouts.

“The family was so upset,” remembers Nazeer Ahmed, Abu Zar’s brother in 
Pakistan. “We were running everywhere, contacting police, airport authorities 
and the airlines. We couldn’t find anything.”

Eventually, after more searching, they learned that Abu Zar had successfully 
boarded his flight to Saudi Arabia, and even touched down on Saudi soil. Beyond 
that, the details were scant.

In April 2012, 17 days after his disappearance, relatives began pouring into 
the family home in Bhakkar district to offer condolences to the parents and 
siblings. Family members dissolved into elegiac verses. Most had resigned 
themselves to the idea that the worst had come to pass, convinced that Abu Zar 
had died a mysterious death. Even though there was no body to mourn, tears were 
shed.

Not long after the unforeseen funeral, however, Ahmed received a call from 
Saudi Arabia. To his astonishment, Abu Zar was still alive.

On the phone, Abu Zar said he had been booked on drug trafficking charges and 
sentenced to death by a Saudi court. He had tried to get in touch with 
Al-Sagheer, his Saudi employer, for any form of assistance, but the calls had 
gone unanswered. The family was dismayed to learn that Abu Zar’s hearing took 
place without a lawyer, as the Saudi government held itself under no obligation 
to provide legal representation to the accused, including those facing the 
death penalty.

Following his arrest, Abu Zar was housed inside Briman jail in Jeddah, a 
multifunctional sand-coloured complex that served as a detention centre housing 
men, women and minors. During his initial stay, Abu Zar had lost all contact 
with the outside world, and spent his days in detention listless and stressed. 
He told his brother that Briman jail provided decent enough food that he was 
still eating. But the mental anguish of detention often felt like a bullet 
piercing through him, he said.

Abu Zar feared death, and the time in jail allowed thoughts of little else, his 
brother said. Worse, Abu Zar did not know the exact day the execution would 
take place, only that it would transpire in some always-imminent future. The 
uncertainty weighed heavily on him, as it did for many prisoners who had no 
choice but to wait for their own execution.

“They don’t tell a person beforehand,” said Ahmed. “They just pick him from the 
prison and behead him.”

Abu Zar had appealed directly to the Pakistani and Saudi governments to be 
released, but his search for clemency bore no fruit. Meanwhile, Abu Zar was 
worried and anxious about how his children were faring in his absence. He had 
four children — two daughters and two sons — and he thought of them often while 
he was in prison. He furtively called his family back home in Pakistan by 
bribing a guard in the jail. Other prisoners kept phones illegally, bartering 
minutes on the phone among fellow inmates. The privilege of calling home was 
eagerly sought after by detainees.

“Prisoners have a right to see and meet their children,” his brother told me, 
saying that the family in Pakistan was not kept abreast of anything happening 
in Jeddah. Distressed by the lack of information, the family arranged an umrah 
[pilgrimage] visa for Abu Zar’s father. “He went to Saudi Arabia and submitted 
papers in the Pakistani embassy. He also met the judge.” Still, it changed 
little — Abu Zar remained in prison.

In recounting the situation, Abu Zar’s brother lamented the Pakistani 
government’s inattention and negligence.

Complicating matters was Ali’s health which, by December 2017, had deteriorated 
entirely. That month, Ali’s physician informed him that he was suffering from 
stage-4 terminal liver cancer which doctors had no cure for. The likelihood of 
him dying, either on death row or in the hospital, was now almost a foregone 
conclusion.

“The people in the government didn’t listen,” said Ahmed. “They don’t pay heed 
to his situation. What can we do about it?”

Indeed, for migrant workers detained on death row, the Saudi justice system 
often seems cruelly capricious. Sometimes detainees believe their punishment 
will span a fixed interval of time, only to realise the judges have arbitrarily 
modified the sentencing.

“They will give you a punishment of 15 years’ imprisonment, and after five 
years they can change this and give you capital punishment,” Ahmed says. “When 
a person is working in another country, he feels imprisoned even when he is 
free. So you can only imagine the condition of those who are actually in 
prisons there.”

Worse, the Saudi government rarely informs foreign embassies when a citizen is 
on death row, as required by the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Many 
families never learn that their relatives are facing the gallows.

Ahmed adds that he attempted several times to lodge complaints regarding the 
outcome of his brother’s trial and detention, but there are few avenues open to 
report grievances.

Ahmed says that the worst moment is reserved for the time after the execution, 
not before: “They don’t send the body back to his family. They throw it away.”

Sohail Yafat, an investigator with the JPP, echoes Ahmed’s claim by saying that 
the Saudi criminal system does not give much hope to families who are looking 
for closure after capital punishment. Thanks to strict Islamic burial rites, 
the Saudi government often buries the dead bodies in unknown locations in the 
kingdom. Families waiting to receive the bodies often wait interminably long 
intervals before being told that there was no body to send back.

While this policy impacts migrant workers from a variety of countries, other 
foreign governments have been more active in addressing it. In 2017, 
neighbouring India had to petition the Saudi state for the repatriation of a 
woman’s body to Kerala, India, a successful move that showed the impact of a 
government exerting pressure. For Pakistani migrant workers, Islamabad’s lack 
of diplomatic lobbying has meant that few, if any, deceased bodies are returned 
to the next of kin.

Theoretically, the mechanisms should already be in place to address these 
issues. Pakistani embassies and consulates across the globe employ “community 
welfare attachés,” a department tasked with keeping track of any labour 
problems impacting Pakistani citizens in the destination country. In addition 
to studying local labour market conditions (which, in the Gulf, often includes 
the abuse and exploitation of Pakistani labourers), the remit of the community 
welfare attaché also extends to taking note of how many Pakistani citizens are 
imprisoned in local jails and, in some circumstances, visiting them or 
notifying their families in Pakistan of an inmate’s condition in jail.

However, according to the JPP, the majority of Pakistani prisoners in Saudi 
jails say that their embassy has never visited them in jail. Pakistani 
diplomatic missions in Saudi Arabia say they remain too chronically 
understaffed to review, let alone help address, the burgeoning prisoner 
population.

“Abu Zar’s story is one case but there are thousands of people in Saudi Arabia 
with the same story,” says Ahmed. His calls with Abu Zar allowed Ahmed to glean 
insight into how pervasive the detention of Pakistan drug traffickers was in 
the Saudi prison system. He says Pakistanis crowd the jails and often have 
similar profiles: they fall prey to organised drug smuggling syndicates 
operating in Pakistan that lure migrant workers to the Gulf with promises of 
jobs that never materialise. Sometimes the migrants are asked to carry packages 
by a member of the group; other times, they are forced to ingest grammes of 
heroin at gunpoint. Often, they land on death row in Saudi Arabia, living in a 
state of limbo as the state decides when to mete out the punishment.

In the last few years, the number of Pakistanis has topped the list of 
foreigners executed on death row in Saudi Arabia. While other South Asian 
countries have successfully exerted diplomatic pressure on Saudi Arabia to free 
their citizens (for example, asking Riyadh to commute a sentence or deport a 
worker), Pakistan has shied away from prodding its close ally to extend 
clemency or grant fairer or more lenient punishments proportionate to the 
severity of the crime.

For example, the Philippines — one of the largest migrant-sending countries in 
Asia — not only takes up every case of a Filipino on death row in Saudi Arabia, 
it hires Saudi lawyers to defend its citizens. Likewise, a Sri Lankan housemaid 
escaped death by stoning in 2015, after Colombo filed an appeal against the 
death sentence. Overwhelmingly, when Riyadh has resolved death penalty cases 
without an execution, it has involved the foreign citizen’s embassy or 
government directly entreating the Saudis to lift the punishment or commute the 
sentence.

Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs contends that it does not have 
bargaining power with Saudi Arabia to negotiate the release of its citizens. 
However, evidence suggests otherwise: given their historically robust military 
and political partnership, Pakistan would seem to enjoy qualitatively better 
relations with Saudi Arabia than other Asian states.

As many as 70,000 Pakistani soldiers serve in Saudi Arabia’s military, and 
Pakistan’s former Chief of Army Staff Raheel Sharif was also tapped to lead 
Saudi Arabia’s new counter-terrorism military alliance in January 2017. 
Moreover, beyond the 2.5 billion US dollars in bilateral trade shared between 
the two Muslim countries, Pakistan’s 3rd-largest city, Faisalabad, is named in 
honour of the late Saudi King Faisal, whose name — and largesse — is also 
behind the construction of one of the largest mosques in Pakistan, the Faisal 
Mosque in Islamabad.

In 2014, when former prime minister Nawaz Sharif visited Saudi Arabia, the late 
King Abdullah described the unwavering Pakistan-Saudi Arabia partnership in 
glowing terms, reiterating that Saudis would always support Pakistan’s 
government and people. Indeed, according to Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, 
Saudi Arabia has few allies like Pakistan: “We consider Pakistan our 2nd home,” 
he said.

When Prime Minister Imran Khan visited Saudi Arabia in 2018 in search of 
economic assistance, he referenced the plight of migrant workers. “I feel bad 
sometimes, because we have not been able to create the conditions that would 
keep them at home,” he told a Saudi audience. “All they do is work very hard 
here to feed their families.”

In the lead-up to Khan’s election, his party pledged to reform consular 
services for overseas Pakistanis. “We will strengthen Pakistani embassies to 
provide emergency relief and other support to citizens facing hardship in case 
of any tragedy. We will provide consular and legal services to all Pakistanis 
jailed abroad,” his party wrote. “Our Ministry of Foreign Affairs must be 
focused on furthering not just Pakistan’s interests abroad, but also ensuring 
protection of our citizens abroad.”

Indeed, without state-level intervention from Pakistan, families of migrants 
such as Abu Zar may have no choice but to accept that neither the Saudi nor the 
Pakistani government will stand with their family in their hour of need.

(source: Sabrina Topps; The writer is a journalist based in Lahore. This essay 
is a modified excerpt from Uncertain Journeys: Labour Migration from South 
Asia, published in December 2018----Dawn)








MALAYSIA:

Death penalty must stay



The police are the appropriate authority when it comes to dealing with the 
criminal mind.

Part of the psychological warfare that is ingrained into the war against crime 
is the death sentence. It has its required effect during the initial stages of 
evidence gathering, specifically during interviews of witnesses and 
interrogation of suspects.

It is also a crucial calming factor for the psychological difficulty for both 
the investigator and the families of such heinous crimes especially during the 
initial stage of investigations, when families are in trauma during and after a 
commission of such serious offences.

More so when they are first informed, or when they first witness or survive 
such brutal offences, notwithstanding the stress witnesses are put through 
during proceedings.

In fact, there is an array of different limbs in the Penal Code and relevant 
Acts in most definitions of major crimes that assist investigators during the 
initial stage of investigations into serious crimes.

The stringent definitions by itself, apart from trite law, act as natural check 
and balances to any such conviction. The actual number of such convictions are 
low in terms of statistical percentage.

The death penalty plays a significant role in the said psywar in dealing with 
these dangerous criminals. It allows some leverage to procure intelligence and 
admissible evidence when dealing with such hardcore criminals.

These are part of the tools of investigation that are at the disposal of a good 
and experienced investigator. It is applied with appropriate force within the 
ambits of the rule of law.

Having dealt with serious crime offenders both during proceedings and in 
serious crimes investigations, it is opined that the death penalty should stay.

It is still relevant when we deal with criminals who are sadistically and 
mutantly brutal during the commission of serious crimes.

Although the argument for the abolishment of the death penalty has its merits 
from the human rights perspective, it is not prudent for us to completely 
remove it from our criminal justice system.

It is more practical to have it as a possible option rather than eliminating it 
completely. Some of the extremely dangerous criminal minds are beyond 
comprehension and belief and normally, only the serious crime investigators are 
exposed to these traits.

These dangerous species walk amongst us and their DNA to inflict unbelievable 
bodily harm is extreme and the death penalty is the only appropriate sentence.

Laws, however, can be amended to giving discretionary powers to the judiciary, 
moving away from some offences that carry a mandatory sentence. That will be 
the humane compromise.

(source: The Malaysian Insight)








INDONESIA:

South Sumatra court delivers death penalty to 9 drug dealers



The Palembang District Court in South Sumatra sentenced 9 people to death on 
Thursday after finding them guilty of transporting 80 kilograms of crystal 
methamphetamine.

According to the hearings of the trial, the convicts, all of whom originally 
come from Surabaya, East Java, were caught transporting drugs from Palembang to 
Java between March and April of 2018. They transported them using a truck that 
was loaded with cassava as a cover.

The police first arrested 3 who had left 3.5 kilograms of the crystal meth at a 
Palembang airport, which led to the arrest of 5 others at a hotel in Surabaya, 
where they were found with 5.8 kilograms of meth and 4,950 ecstasy pills.

The leader of the group, Letto, is 25 while most of the other members are in 
their 20s.

“What the defendants have done is they have damaged the youth and the 
government is currently waging a war on drugs,” said jugde Efrata Tarigan.

They were all sentenced to death despite prosecutors' earlier demand of a life 
sentence.

South Sumatra Police narcotics unit deputy director Adj. Sr. Comr. Amazona 
Pelamonia said the sentence should serve as a warning to other drug dealers 
operating in Palembang.

“They are a syndicate from Surabaya that was caught after a lengthy 
investigation,” Amazona said on Friday. “The death penalty will create a 
deterrent effect and serves as a warning to other [drug traffickers].”

Amazona added that South Sumatra had potential routes for drug syndicates 
because of its developed land transportation infrastructure and the 
availability of interprovincial flights.

Arif Rahman, a lawyer of the defendants, said he would appeal the verdict, 
saying that the convicts were “victims” of a drug syndicate.

“Maybe the judges had other considerations that pushed them to sentence all of 
my clients to death,” Arif said.

(source: The Jakarta Post)