[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----worldwide

[Rick Halperin]

September 1




INDIA:

Delhi Police urges court to prosecute Tharoor for murder of Sunanda Pushkar 
---- The former Union minister, who is currently on bail in the case, was 
charged by Delhi Police under Sections 498-A and 306 of the Indian Penal Code



Delhi Police on Saturday urged a city court to prosecute Congress MP Shashi 
Tharoor for abetment to suicide or "in alternative" on murder charge in the 
case of death of his wife Sunanda Pushkar in 2014.

"Please frame sections 498-A(husband or his relative subjecting a woman to 
cruelty), 306 (abetment of suicide) or in alternative 302 (murder) IPC against 
the accused (Tharoor)," the probe agency told special judge Ajay Kumar Kuhar.

Senior public prosecutor Atul Srivastava made the submissions during arguments 
on framing of charges in the case.

The former Union minister, who is currently on bail in the case, was charged by 
Delhi Police under Sections 498-A and 306 of the Indian Penal Code.

Reading out a statement of the couple's domestics help, who is one of the 
witnesses in the case, the prosecutor said that the couple had fight over a 
girl named 'Katy' and some Blackberry messages.

The prosecutor said that before her death, Pushkar wanted to address a press 
conference on the IPL issue and had said "I will not leave him (Tharoor)".

The witness had told police that 1 year prior to the demise, the couple used to 
fight a lot.

The agency told the court that Pushkar was "distressed" and "felt betrayed" in 
her marital life.

Police told the court that Pushkar was suffering from mental agony due to a 
strained relationship with her husband. She had a scuffle with her husband and 
had various injury marks few days before her death, they said.

Police accused Tharoor of torturing his wife which abetted her to commit 
suicide.

The probe agency told the court that according to the post-mortem report, the 
cause of Pushkar's death was poisoning and 15 injury marks were found on 
various parts of her body, including in forearm, arms and legs.

The prosecutor further told the court that Tharoor's relation with Pakistani 
journalist Mehr Tarar also added to Pushkar's mental agony.

The prosecutor also apprised the court about Pushkar's friend and journalist 
Nalini Singh's statement, which is part of the charge sheet, that the relation 
between the couple was tense and bad.

"She (Pushkar) told she helped Tharoor a lot in IPL matter. She had found some 
messages between Tarar and Tharoor. She refused to go to their house and 
instead went to Leela hotel. The relation between the couple was very bad," 
Singh had said in her statement.

Senior advocate Vikas Pahwa, appearing for Tharoor, refuted the submissions, 
saying the arguments made by the prosecutor were contrary to the bare reading 
of the charge sheet and the charges pressed by him were "absurd and 
preposterous".

The case is now listed for the next hearing on October 17.

The case was earlier sent to the sessions court for further proceedings.

The maximum punishment for the offence listed in the charge sheet is 10 years 
of imprisonment. However, if convicted for 302 (murder), the maximum punishment 
is death penalty while the minimum is life imprisonment.

Pushkar's death had created a sensation as it came shortly after a bitter spat 
between the couple on Twitter over his alleged affair with Tarar.

Pushkar, 51, was found dead in a suite of luxury hotel Leela in Delhi's 
Chanakyapuri on the night of January 17, 2014.

The couple was staying at the hotel as the official bungalow of Tharoor was 
being renovated at that time.

(source: business-standard.com)








CHINA:

Yang Hengjun: A Diplomatic Hostage



Diplomatic relations between Australia and China have become increasingly 
antagonistic as Australian writer and political commentator, Yang Hengjun, 
continues to be held by Chinese authorities. Earlier this week, attempts by the 
Australian government to return Yang home failed as China formally charged the 
pro-democracy advocate with “espionage.”

In response, Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne has been 
uncharacteristically frank in her remarks that Yang is not only being held in 
“harsh” conditions but implied the grounds of the allegations were also 
unfounded; “There is no basis for any allegation Dr Yang was spying for the 
Australian government.” Senator Payne went on to state: “Most importantly that 
if he is to be detained, that he is detained in accordance with the 
expectations accorded to him through conventions in international law, and they 
include access to lawyers, they include appropriate conditions of detention.” 
Beijing’s response was equally strong-worded, with China’s Foreign Affairs 
spokesman Geng Shuang rebuking that, “China deplores the Australian statement 
on this case. I would like to reiterate that China is a country with rule of 
law.”

In China, being found guilty of espionage can carry penalties anywhere from 3 
years to the death penalty. Not only does Yang Hengjun face the possibility of 
being found guilty of a capital offence on a vague charge but also, despite 
what Chinese authorities have publicly stated, is experiencing poor conditions 
of detainment without access to his lawyers or his family for the last 7 months 
of investigation. Since his formal arrest last week, he has been allocated a 
30-minute monthly meeting with Australian embassy staff, however, he is still 
restricted from meeting lawyers or loved ones, and his wife has been banned 
from leaving China.

An ongoing trial of wills, the detainment of Yang Hengjun for the ambiguous 
charge of “committing espionage crimes” could very possibly define the 
Sino-Australian relationship going forward, particularly since it coincides 
with the persistent depression in diplomatic cooperation between Canberra and 
Beijing. Despite being Australia’s largest exporter, the divergence in 
political outlooks has placed the 2 countries on a collision course in which 
the arrest of Yang, an Australian citizen and critic of the Chinese state, 
could be the moment of impact.

To fully appreciate the importance of Yang’s formal arrest, it is important to 
place it in a context of tit-for-tat diplomacy whereby primarily non-democratic 
countries have been attempting to force their will by detaining or persecuting 
foreign citizens. This “hostage diplomacy” has already occurred in the wake of 
Meng Wenzhou’s arrest in Vancouver, which led to the retaliatory detainment of 
Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor by the Chinese government.

A pro-democracy activist and former Chinese diplomat, the lack of proof 
justifying the espionage accusation of Yang lead to one deduction: the arrest 
of Yang is far more political than legal. Chen Yonglin, a former Chinese 
diplomat himself who defected to Australia in 2005 stated: “It’s revenge…China 
wants to save their image, and to show the Chinese (are) very much powerful and 
influential enough to say no to a foreign Western hostile power.”

The Australian Director of the Human Rights Watch, Elaine Pearson also 
expressed concern for the Chinese Government’s brazenness in an international 
setting geared towards cooperation. China has warned Australia not to intervene 
in the case and demands respect for its judicial sovereignty. In situations 
like these, where the universalism of human rights, the duty of a nation to 
protect its people and the right of a state to exercise sovereignty and protect 
its security, expose the difficulty democratic states face when negotiating 
with foreign and politically dissimilar countries. The solution will take time 
and negotiation, however, in the short term, ANU security expert Rory Medcalf 
recommended Australia change its travel advice to notify Australian citizens of 
Chinese origin to use caution and be aware of the greater risk they take when 
travelling to China.

The future for Yang Hengjun is uncertain, and the strategy Australia chooses to 
adopt, whether it be appeasement or retaliation, will have long term 
consequences for Sino-Australian cooperation for decades to come. In a 
situation of strained relations over a range of issues including Huawei’s ban, 
Chinese espionage allegations and military expansion in the South China Sea, 
the arrest of Yang is more than an attempt to protect national security by the 
Chinese government. The arrest of Yang is more so a political signal that the 
Chinese Communist Party will enforce authority and penalty against critics of 
the Chinese state, particularly those of Chinese origin.

(source: The Organization for World Peace)








PAKISTAN:

Policeman’s murderer convicted



An Anti-Terrorism Court (ATC) has awarded death sentence to an accused in 
murder of a policeman.

According to the police, Raheel along with co-accused opened fire at the 
policemen deployed for the patrolling at Aram Bagh area in which a policeman, 
Noman, was killed on the spot while another policeman Suhail got injured.

The court awarded him capital punishment and 22 years of imprisonment when he 
was proven guilty on charges of encounter with police, killing of a policeman 
and possessing illegal arms.

(source: The Express Tribune)

*********

Righting wrongs



MONTESQUIEU, a French legal jurist and philosopher, once wrote in The Spirit of 
the Laws: “There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the 
shield of the law and in the name of justice.” In Pakistan, for the victims of 
wrongful convictions, nothing would ring more true.

In the well-known Mazhar Hussain case, a man falsely convicted for murder spent 
13 years on death row before he was acquitted by the Supreme Court for all 
charges. Unfortunately, he was acquitted two years after he had already died in 
jail. In 2017, a man falsely accused in a blasphemy case was acquitted from a 
life sentence by the Supreme Court after spending 9 years in jail. When the 
Supreme Court released him, he was let go with a mere apology. Most recently, 
in 2018, the Supreme Court acquitted a 21-year-old man who was falsely 
convicted for trafficking drugs when he was just a 10-year-old boy. After 
spending more than a decade in terrible prison conditions, he was released — by 
then fatally afflicted with tuberculosis.

One could forgive such horrifying incidents of maladministration of justice and 
wrongful convictions if they were outliers of an otherwise efficient criminal 
justice system. However, among the legal community such stories are neither 
shocking nor outliers. They are the norm.

As per a recently launched report by the Foundation of Fundamental Rights (FFR) 
and Reprieve, which conducted a detailed analysis of Supreme Court judgements 
on death penalty appeals from 2010 to 2018, it has come to light that 39 per 
cent of all capital cases end in complete acquittal. However, the average time 
spent by innocent persons in jail, convicted on death row, until they are 
acquitted by the Supreme Court on appeal is a shocking 10 years. In fact, one 
in every 10 wrongfully convicted death row inmates must wait more than 15 years 
before he or she is released!

Over1/3 of death row appeals end in complete acquittal.

This means that in Pakistan, averagely, over one third of the prison population 
convicted and sentenced to the death penalty is comprised of innocent people, 
all of whom will eventually be acquitted, but not until they have wasted 10 to 
15 years of their lives in an overcrowded and poorly managed jail, waiting for 
justice to be done.

Victims of wrongful convictions lose valuable time and reputation, face 
stigmatisation, as well as suffer significant economic harm – and it is well 
known that the more time lost behind bars always equals to more damage suffered 
by a victim. Therefore, upon release, it should be the duty of the government 
under the principle of ‘ubi jus, ibi remedium’ to make the person whole for the 
loss they have suffered for every hour of every day they have wrongly spent in 
jail so that they may be able to readjust back into society and rebuild their 
lives. This is why many states in the world, along with improving their 
criminal justice systems, have enacted legislation to provide just compensation 
for the innocents they jail.

A system of providing financial compensation to the wrongfully convicted also 
acts as a powerful financial deterrent against the state from wrongfully 
convicting its own citizens. It does this by ensuring that the state does not 
overzealously prosecute persons who might be innocent and ensuring that 
criminal investigations and prosecutions are comprehensive. Furthermore, it 
encourages governments to fund legal reforms more proactively so as to avoid 
financial liabilities. Most importantly, courts are also mindful of providing 
every citizen a fair opportunity of defence before conviction. Overall, such 
legislation produces accountability for one of the most restrictive powers of 
the state: the power to restrain the liberty of its citizens.

Given that the number of wrongful convictions is very high and the average time 
of acquittal is also excessively lengthy, it is the need of the hour for 
Pakistan to also enact legislation that provides for some recompense to those 
who have had their liberty unjustly snatched away by the state. One would hope 
that the current government would take initiative and promulgate a law that 
provides financial compensation to the wrongfully convicted in Pakistan by 
reimbursing them for all court and attorney fees they spend fighting their 
conviction, along with an annual allowance for each year that they spent 
wrongfully incarcerated; factoring in their loss of income along with any 
reputational harm as well.

This is the least we must do to meet with the constitutional promise set out by 
Article 4 and Article 9 of the Constitution; that no action detrimental to the 
right of liberty of a citizen shall be taken except in strict accordance of the 
law, lest the shield of the law and the name of justice in Pakistan becomes 
synonymous with ‘tyranny’ to those innocents who toil away in jail, waiting to 
be vindicated.

(source: Omer Malik; The writer is a human rights lawyer working at the Law and 
Policy Chambers in Islamabad----dawn.com)