[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

Dec. 12




MALAYSIA:

The inevitability of error----The writer says the decision by the Government to 
abolish the mandatory death sentence for drugs offences is a clear recognition 
that the mandatory death regime does not act as a deterrent.


Many have forgotten the wrongful conviction of S. Karthigesu who was charged, 
tried and convicted for the murder of Jean Perera Sinnappa which took place in 
1979. Karthigesu was the only suspect.

The murder trial took 38 days. The main prosecution witness was Bhandulananda 
Jayatilake. He testified that he witnessed Karthigesu exclaimed that Jean "did 
not deserve to live". The trial Judge regarded these words as an incriminating 
outburst. No evidence was ever found to directly identify the killer. The 
murder weapon was also never discovered despite the police best efforts.

Karthigesu was given a mandatory death sentence by the trial Judge. He appealed 
to the Federal Court against his conviction and death sentence. 4 days after 
Karthigesu's conviction, Jayatilake who was the main prosecution witness came 
forward. He confessed that he had lied. He did not witness the alleged 
incriminating outburst implicating Karthigesu.

According to the judgment of the Court, he had been asked to lie in order to 
secure Karthigesu's conviction.

The Federal Court set aside Karthigesu's conviction and mandatory death 
sentence. Jayatilake was then convicted of perjury and was sent to prison for 
10 years.

After having been on the death row for more than 2 years, Karthigesu was freed. 
He was indeed very lucky. Many others before and after him may have not been so 
lucky. Karthigesu was a victim of a miscarriage of justice.

The critical lesson from Jean's case is that the legal system was unable to 
uncover the witness' dishonesty. The trial Judge believed the perjured evidence 
given by Jayatilake.

Our criminal justice system is clearly not perfect and is susceptible to 
errors. Errors can be deliberate as well as unintentional. Even an honest 
witness can be mistaken.

Capital punishment has no place in a society that values and respects human 
lives. Article 5(1) of our Federal Constitution specifically mandates the 
Government to protect the citizens' right to life.

The recent announcement by the government through its de facto law minister, 
Honourable Nancy Shukri that the government will be tabling an amendment to the 
law to abolish mandatory death sentence in relation to drugs offences is a move 
in the right direction.

The decision by the government to abolish the mandatory death sentence for 
drugs offences is a clear recognition that the mandatory death regime does not 
act as a deterrent.

A startling revelation was made by Tun Hanif Omar, the former Inspector-General 
of Police, about the introduction of the mandatory death sentence for drugs 
offences at a recent seminar on 17 November 2015 which was attended by Members 
of Parliament from both sides of the political divide.

According to Tun Hanif, the government's decision in 1983 to impose the 
mandatory death sentence for drugs offences was made after a conversation 
between former Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad and the then 
Attorney-General Tan Sri Abu Talib Othman regarding the disparity in the 
imposition of the death sentence for drug offences.

Tun Mahathir was told that 2 High Court judges had openly declared that they 
would not impose the death sentence for drug related offences.

The government then decided to standardise the inconsistent punishments and 
"experimented" with the introduction of the mandatory death sentence regime for 
drug offences.

If this is the case, the mandatory death sentence appears to have been 
introduced arbitrarily and without any empirical evidence that would support 
the belief that it would reduce the commission of drug offences.

This "experiment" failed miserably. In March 2012, Datuk Seri Hishammuddin 
Hussein, who was then the home minister, admitted in Parliament that the 
introduction of the mandatory death sentence in 1983 had not reduced 
drug-related offences.

He said that the drug trafficking arrests had in fact increased. He revealed 
that there were 2,999 arrests for drug trafficking offences in 2009 and these 
arrests went up to 3,845 in 2011. This failed "experiment" clearly points to 1 
conclusion - a mandatory death sentence is not an effective deterrent for drug 
offences.

Malaysia is one of 13 countries in the world that still retains the mandatory 
death sentence. We currently have 10 offences with mandatory death sentences in 
force. The effect of a mandatory death sentence is that upon a guilty verdict, 
the only punishment available to be meted out is death.

The problem with a mandatory death sentence is that the Judge does not have any 
discretion to take into account the individual circumstances of the convicted 
person.

The judge is prevented from taking into account any aggravating and/or 
mitigating factors available to the convicted person when deciding on the 
suitable punishment to be meted out against the convicted person.

This limitation means that the sentence of death is arbitrary since it does not 
take into account the varying degrees or types of culpability.

International law states that the mandatory death sentence is contrary to the 
right to life of each individual as it is arbitrary and has also been deemed to 
be disproportionate thus violating the prohibition on cruel and unusual 
punishment.

The government has a positive obligation to protect life as mandated by our 
Federal Constitution.

Under international law a judge should be given the discretion to mete out the 
appropriate sentence in capital punishment cases.

Many courts in the Commonwealth including, India, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Malawi 
and Uganda have declared the mandatory death penalty as unconstitutional.

The often quoted reason for not abolishing the mandatory death sentence is the 
notion that the public demands such a harsh punishment.

A public opinion survey was carried out in Malaysia in 2013 by Roger Hood, 
Professor Emeritus of Criminology at the University of Oxford.

The survey results showed that there was very little public support for the law 
which requires that a mandatory death penalty should be imposed on all persons 
convicted for murder, trafficking of drugs and for certain non-fatal firearms 
offences.

We are in fact ready for change. With the support of the Malaysian public, the 
Government must now act to abolish the mandatory death sentence for all crimes.

Ultimately, the government should work towards progressively abolishing capital 
punishment for all offences.

We should not wait to admit to the imperfection of our criminal justice system. 
There is always a risk that we may become the victim of a miscarriage of 
justice ourselves.

By then, it would be too late. The truth is that you can only protect your own 
life in this world by protecting the lives of others.

*Abdul Rashid Ismail is the immediate past president of the National Human 
Rights Society (HAKAM).

HAKAM-MMO Human Rights Day 2015 project

Since 1950, the world marks December 10 as Human Rights Day. It is a day to 
create awareness to fundamental human rights set out in the Universal 
Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) as the common standard of achievement for 
all peoples and all nations.

This year, the National Human Rights Society, in collaboration with Malay Mail 
Online, is publishing 7 articles over 7 days to bring attention to 7 specific 
interest areas concerning human rights in Malaysia.

(source: Opinion, Abdul Srashi Ismail, themalaymailonline.com)






INDIA:

Bengaluru: Muslims demand death penalty for Hindu Mahasabha leader Kamlesh 
Tiwari for insulting Prophet Mohammad


On Friday evening, Bengaluru saw a huge congregation of Muslims take out a 
massive protest rally, which obstructed traffic and raised a lot of questions 
about what the protest was about. The rally, that saw the presence of close to 
20,000 Muslims and brought Bengaluru traffic to a standstill, was against right 
wing Hindutva leader Kamlesh Tiwari. The Muslims were protesting against the 
derogatory remarks made by the Tiwari against Prophet Mohammad.

The Hindu Mahasabha activist had made the derogatory remarks against the 
Prophet in Uttar Pradesh, in response to which, thousands of Muslims under the 
banner of 'Ittehad-e-Millat' led by Maulana Khalid, closed their business and 
demonstrated against him. The protesting Muslims demanded that Tiwari be 
awarded a death penalty for his remarks. The activist's remarks had sparked 
similar strong reactions from the minority community in several parts of the 
state. However, no untoward incident has been reported till date.

Before this, similar protests had occurred in communally sensitive 
Muzaffarnagar, when nearly one lakh Muslims had gathered together to protest, 
right after Tiwari had made the remarks. A leader of 'Ittehad-e-Millat', Haji 
Ehsaan, had earlier told Times of India, "Kamlesh Tiwari has offended Muslims 
across India and he needs to be punished. We cannot hear any such words against 
our Prophet. The sentiments of Muslims should be respected. We demand that 
action be taken against Tiwari at the earliest. This kind of venom cannot be 
allowed to spread in society."

(source: india.com)






IRAN----execution

A prisoner hanged in northern Iran


The Iranian regime's henchmen hanged a 36-year-old father of 3 in a prison in 
the city of Gorgan in northern Iran.

The victim identified as Hossein Naybandani had been sentenced to death for 
"transferring and being in possession of drugs."

Naybandani was hanged early morning on Sunday in the main prison in Gorgan.

There has been no official information released on his execution.

Execution rates have been increasing at "an exponential rate" in Iran. Since 
Hassan Rouhani took office as president of the clerical regime, the rate of 
executions has reach its highest in 25 years.

Iran under the rule of the mullahs is the number 1 record holder for the number 
of executions per capita.

As Ahmed Shaheed, the U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in Iran, has 
pointed out, the Iranian regime "continues to execute more individuals per 
capita than any other country in the world."

The number of executions by the regime is much higher than those officially 
reported or published in state media.

(source: NCR-Iran)

***********

A Prisoner Hanged for Drug Offenses, Another Prisoner Hanged in Public


On Sunday December 6, a prisoner with alleged drug charges was reportedly 
hanged at Gorgan Central Prison. On Wednesday December 9, an unidentified 
prisoner with alleged rape charges was reportedly hanged in a public space in 
Mamasani, a county in the province of Fars.

According to the human rights group, HRANA, the prisoner who was hanged on 
Sunday is Hossein Neybandani, a 31-year old man accused of possessing and 
trafficking narcotics. Iranian official sources have been silent about 
Neybandani's execution.

According to the Iranian official news site Seda o Sima, the unidentified 
prisoner was 21 years old at the time of his execution.

(source: Iran Human Rights)

**********

Iran Unlikely to Bend to Pressure After International Human Rights Day


Thursday marked the 67th annual International Human Rights Day. Naturally, the 
event served to renew attention to a range of human rights issues related to 
Iran. The National Council of Resistance of Iran reported, for instance, that a 
multi-party conference of British Members of Parliament was held in the House 
of Commons to mark the occasion with a discussion of the most recent attack on 
the Iranian dissident community of Camp Liberty, as well as the international 
response to Iran's various ongoing human rights abuses.

The NCRI's president, Maryam Rajavi, addressed the gathering to explain that 
the regime's extensive crackdown on dissidents, activists, journalists, and 
minorities has had little impact on the sentiment of ordinary Iranians, who 
continue to demonstrate against the theocratic government on a regular basis. 
Earlier in the week Iran News Update reported upon several incidents of 
activist pushback against the latest attempts by Tehran to suppress media and 
cultural expressions.

But Iran News Update also noted that this resilience does not seem to have 
slowed down the government's repressive measures in any fashion. It may, 
however, have inspired more foreign activism of the sort seen among British MPs 
and other supporters of the Iranian people on Human Rights Day. Some of those 
MPs used the occasion to urge the active protection of Camp Liberty and other 
groups within the reach of foreign governments, as well as policy initiatives 
such as punitive sanctions against individuals and entities responsible for the 
domestic repression within Iran.

But although that repression has led many to regard Iran as a pariah state, its 
defiance of this status remained very clear in the midst of the week's renewed 
foreign activism. As previously reported, Amnesty International this week 
restated its criticism of Iran's continued use of the death penalty against 
juvenile offenders. In what could be viewed as a response to earlier such 
criticisms, the Islamic Republic recently upheld the death sentences against 2 
such offenders who had been the subject of vigorous international activism.

On Friday, the Christian Post called attention to another such Iranian act of 
defiance against international norms. Following upon earlier reports from the 
NCRI and Iran Human Rights, the outlet reported that a woman accused of 
complicity in the murder of her husband was recently sentenced to be buried up 
to her neck and pelted with stones until she is dead.

Despite the Iran-related activism seen in some circles on Human Rights Day, the 
Christian Post reiterated that many commentators on international affairs have 
accused the world community and particularly Western powers such as the United 
States of effectively turning a blind eye to human rights issues in the midst 
of attempts to secure and implement the deal ostensibly constraining the 
Iranian nuclear program.

But the same report quotes one expert as saying that the international 
sensitivity to issues like stoning makes it unlikely that the recent sentence 
will be carried out as ordered. It may instead be converted to a sentence of 
death by hanging, making the unnamed defendant 1 of the approximately 3 
hangings per day that are currently being carried out in the Islamic Republic.

If the Christian Post is correct in suggesting that the stoning will not be 
carried out, it likely means that the sentence was considered by the Iranian 
judiciary as a symbolic reaffirmation of its fundamentalist sharia laws. In 
other words, it allows Iran to formally reject compliance with international 
norms, while stopping just short of violations that would draw near-universal 
outcry from foreign powers. But for Human Rights Day activists, this no doubt 
helps to highlight the number of slightly less egregious offenses that Iran is 
currently getting away with, perhaps because of international focus on the 
nuclear deal.

The aforementioned crackdown on media and supposedly non-Islamic culture is 
certainly ongoing. For instance, IranWire reported on Friday that three artists 
who had been arrested in 2013 recently had 6 year prison sentences handed down 
as punishment for the vague, political charges of "insulting the sacred" and 
"propaganda against the regime." This comes about a month after high-profile 
arrests of several Iranian journalists and 2 poets whose work had previously 
been published with the blessing of the regime's censorship authorities.

IranWire also noted that just 1 day ahead of International Human Rights Day, 
the European Court of Justice formally upheld its ruling against Islamic 
Republic of Iran Broadcasting and the English-language propaganda network Press 
TV for their 2009 airings of false confessions elicited under torture. The case 
serves to indicate how the negative roles of Iranian state media reaches beyond 
mere censorship and often includes tacit endorsement of some of the regime's 
most serious abuses.

While examples like these leave no doubt about the persistent problems with 
Iran's human rights, other stories are admittedly less clear-cut. For example, 
the Christian news site Bos News Life reported on Friday that the Iranian 
judiciary had seen fit to release 4 Christian prisoners who had been detained 
for their faith and their participation in the Iranian Christian house church 
movement. The 4 have reportedly be "led to believe that they will not be 
summoned to return to prison."

But this fact in and of itself highlights the largely arbitrary nature of the 
Iranian judicial system. The prisoners have technically been released only on 
temporary leave and thus remain under constant threat of being targeted in 
another crackdown on the rights of religious minorities. Meanwhile, a fellow 
Christian prisoner has been kept in bars beyond the end of his 5-year sentence.

The dichotomy between such instances of release and extended detention may 
serve the same basic purpose for the Iranian judiciary as its symbolic stoning 
sentence. The periodic release of political prisoners could allow foreign and 
domestic activists to entertain the possibility that this signifies progressive 
trends of the sort expected to follow the 2013 election of so-called moderate 
President Hassan Rouhani. At the same time, expanded repression of other 
targets sends a cautionary message to other Iranian citizens.

The same duplicity can easily be found in one interpretation of a story carried 
by the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran on Friday. The activist 
organization suggested that in spite of the stoning sentence and the current 
rate of three executions per day, there may be a major shift emerging within 
the Iranian government on the topic of the death penalty.

The report indicates that 70 Iranian members of parliament have introduced 
legislation to change the maximum sentence for drug related crimes from death 
to life in prison. Non-violent drug crimes currently comprise the vast majority 
of the hundreds of death sentences carried out in Iran every year.

But the change outlined by the bill is notably modest. The International 
Campaign's report indicates that the death penalty would remain viable for any 
cases involving armed trafficking. But more importantly, chances are slim that 
the bill will pass at all. A similar measure was introduced last year but 
failed to move forward. As with all Iranian legislation, the challenges facing 
the new bill include not only passage by the parliament, but also preliminary 
approval by the Guardian Council and final approval by the supreme leader's 
Assembly of Experts.

In light of this, it is entirely possible that Iranian MPs anticipate the same 
outcome for this year's bill as last years, and that the proposal serves only 
to give the impression of a serious response to international pressure. Indeed, 
this view is strongly implied by remarks made by Mohammad Javad Larijani, the 
head of the Human Rights Council of the Iranian Parliament.

Larijani suggested that he supported the outlined changes but also declared 
that they would be very slow in coming. He went on to lodge familiar defenses 
of Iran's sovereign right to its current repressive laws, urging foreign powers 
to tone down criticism over the short term. "This has to go through the 
legislative process but until then Westerners should respect our current laws," 
he said.

(source: irannewsupdate.com)






SAUDI ARABIA:

Artist accused as atheist faces death penalty----The Saudi Arabia case is based 
on a false interpretation of his book, the writer says.


A Palestinian artist sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia for apostasy was quoted 
by a local news website Thursday as saying that he is not an atheist and that 
his case centers around a personal dispute he had with someone.

Ashraf Fayadh gave the interview to Mecca Online from a prison in Abha where he 
has been held since January 2014. He said a Saudi college student he knew filed 
a complaint to religious police accusing him of being an atheist and trying to 
spread atheism through a book of poetry he wrote.

Religious police detained Fayadh for a few hours after the complaint was filed 
and then released him, he said.

Fayadh said his poetry book was then sent to a council of clerics for their 
assessment of its content. The council deemed parts of the book atheistic. He 
said the Arabic book, called "Instructions Within," was published in Lebanon in 
2008 and has not been published in Saudi Arabia.

"I am not an atheist and it is impossible that I could be," he said.

A Saudi court in Abha initially sentenced him to 800 lashes and 4 years in 
prison. He says his prison sentence was based on photos on his phone found by 
the religious police the night of his brief detention. He told Mecca Online the 
photos were of nothing more than of female colleagues he???d met through his 
participation in art exhibitions, which include the 2013 Venice Biennale.

Saudi courts adhere to an ultraconservative interpretation of Islamic law, and 
religious police strictly enforce the segregation of unmarried men and women. 
This has drawn comparisons to some of the ideologies underpinning the extremist 
Islamic State group.

The Saudi Justice Ministry plans to file a case against someone who wrote on 
Twitter that Fayadh's ruling was "IS-like" in reference to the extremist group, 
Islamic State, sometimes known as ISIL or ISIS, a Saudi news website reported 
this week.

Fayadh said after the initial trial, an appeals court recommended blasphemy 
charges against him be stiffened and that he be sentenced to death. He said the 
appeals court also recommended rejecting defense testimony, citing the 
Palestinian artist's own admission he wrote the book.

After 1 hearing, the lower court issued its death sentence in the retrial last 
week on blasphemy-related charges.

"The judgment against me was based on the testimony of this student," Fayadh 
said. "The terminology I am condemned for is not even in the book, but the 
accusation against me was based on wrong interpretations for some of the 
poems."

Fayadh plans to appeal the verdict. There are no known cases in recent years of 
executions for apostasy in Saudi Arabia.

(source: Associated Press)

**********

Human rights in Saudi Arabia


Sir, - Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet, has been sentenced to death in Saudi 
Arabia on the grounds that he has rejected his Muslim faith, although he has 
denied this.

I suggest that Ireland cease all contact with Saudi Arabia's representatives 
here until basic human rights are established in that country. - Yours, etc,

DECLAN MORIARTY,

Finglas,

Dublin 11.

(source: Letter to the Editor, Irish Times)