GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Connecticut is about to become the 17th US state to abolish the death penalty, with both houses voting for a bill to ban it and the governor announcing 11 April he will sign the bill. Five states have abolished it in the past five years, says Human Rights Watch: New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, and Illinois. The group, which has a worldwide campaign against the death penalty, notes that another 13 states that have the penalty on the books have not used it for at least five years.
Human Rights Watch applauds the new bill, but points out that 11 prisoners in Connecticut have still-valid death sentences because it will not apply retroactively. “The failure to make the change retroactive is contrary to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Article 15 states that if a law reduces a criminal penalty, all offenders should benefit from such a reduction, even those who committed their offense before the reduction. However, when the US ratified the treaty in 1992, it included a reservation that it would not adhere to this provision.”
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Public prosecutors in Egypt have completed their case against former President Hosni Mubarak and they have called for the death penalty, by hanging, for him and seven government officials, including his interior minister, Habib El-Adly. They have argued that he was personally implicated in the deaths of several protesters during the uprising in Egypt in early 2011.
Links to other sites: Aljazeera, Ahram, CS Monitor
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Swiss government Friday morning called for Bahrein to end the death penalty, which it has rarely invoked, and to review the four sentences passed in the wake of anti-government protests.
Switzerland is opposed to the death penalty and has been fighting for its universal abolition but the Federal Council notes in its 6 May statement that it is particularly disturbed that Bahrein has just sentenced to death four protesters.
Pvt 1st Class Bradley Manning of the US Army, who supplied WikiLeaks with the classified documents that opened a Pandora’s diplomatic box in late 2010, has been handed 22 new criminal charges. The charges include a capital offense, aiding the enemy, that can incur the death penalty, but according to news agency AP the Army’s prosecution team says it will not seek the death penalty.
Jeff Paterson of Manning’s support network points out that the ruling judge has the final say. “While the military is down playing the fact, the option to execute Bradley has been placed on the table.”
Manning was arrested in May 2010 after he leaked more than 250,000 US diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. His supporters argue that among other benefits of the whistleblowers’ activities, uprisings in the Middle East are thanks to publication of the information.
Links to other sites: Bradley Manning support network, NPR, Wired
The state of Arizona, USA, has gone ahead with the execution of Jeffrey Landrigan after the US Supreme Court overruled two lower court decisions halting the execution 26 October. Landrigan’ lawyers had argued that the substance used as part of a “cocktail” of three drugs commonly administered in lethal injections was not up to US standards because it had been imported, allegedly from the UK.
Several states in the USA have halted carrying out the death penalty because of a shortage of sodium thiopental, one of the drugs, made in the USA by only one company, which has run low on stocks and which has declared that it does not condone its use for capital punishment. The drug is used to make the prisoner unconscious before other drugs are administered to kill him.
Landrigan, 50, has been on death row since 1989. It was Arizona’s first execution since 2007.
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – In one of the fastest political turnarounds in recent memory, a popular initiative to reinstate the death penalty has died, a day after it was announced. The committee, based in Langnau, published a notice on its web site early Wednesday 25 August, saying it will withdraw the referendum, which would have needed 100,000 signatures to make it onto the ballots. The popular initiative had come in for heavy criticism from all political parties in Switzerland and it could have been stopped in any event by the federal government if it was thought to run counter to international law.
The group says the proposal to vote on the matter was the only way to draw attention to what it sees as a dysfunctional justice system. On its site, it ends with the English words “We’ll be back.”
Links to other sites: death penalty popular initiative committee (Ger), TSR (Fre)
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) - A Swiss popular initiative to bring back the death penalty, abolished in 1942, has gathered the necessary signatures and fulfilled other requirements to allow it to move to the next stage, the federal Chancellery announced Tuesday morning 24 August. The authors have until February 2012 to gather 100,000 signatures for a popular countrywide vote to go ahead.
The popular vote would allow the death penalty in the case of murder or death resulting from sexual abuse, rape and child molestation. The federal government, which normally recommends that citizens vote for or against a popular initiative, will not offer its opinion until the necessary signatures have been gathered. The Federal Council could, however, declare it against international law if it sees fit.
The UN Human Rights Commission reported in July 2010 that while the official figures for deaths by capital punishment show 714 people killed in 2009, the figure is likely to be far higher than that, worldwide, since in several countries the information is considered a state secret.
The Swiss vote on anywhere from one (2007) to seven (2008) popular initiatives in a year. In 2010 three of these have made it onto the ballots.
Text of the proposed vote (Fre).
The Iranian Embassy in London is reported by the Times to say that Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, 43, will not be stoned to death, although it is unclear if Iran still intends to carry out the death penalty given the human rights activist. Ashtiani has spent five years in prison and received 99 lashes for adultery, a crime her family says is a bogus charge. An international campaign to save her has put pressure on Iran to review her case and spare the woman. Another 15 people remain on death row in Iran, sentenced to be stoned to death, reports the Guardian.
Links to other sites: Amnesty International, Guardian, MSNBC
Amnesty International 30 March published its annual statistics on the death penalty worldwide, saying that in 2009 “at least 714 people were executed in 18 countries and at least 2001 people were sentenced to death in 56 countries,” but that the figures do not include China, which it accuses of putting to death “thousands” of people. The organization generally estimates the number of dead, but this year refuses to do so, saying it is up to China to publish its figures. China tops its lists for sentencing the most people to death, followed by “Iran with at least 388 executions, Iraq at least 120, Saudi Arabia at least 69 and the USA with 52.”
China’s Supreme Court reportedly sent guidelines to lower courts early in 2010 encouraging them to limit use of the death penalty only in the most severe cases.
Links to other sites: Amnesty International, Reuters, Xinhua
In Geneva, 24-26 February
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Money will help people off the hook in capital punishment cases, according to a round table discussion at the fourth World Congress against the Death Penalty, held in Geneva 24-26 February. That, and the victim being a foreigner makes it unlikely that he or she will be put to death. Panelists from Bahrein, Pakistan and the United States argued that “money can buy you immunity” from prosecution. “Torture and the death penalty are for the poor,” says Kamran Arif, a lawyer from Pakistan, which hands down one-third of the world’s death sentences.
4th World Congress against death penalty in Geneva
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Humour in the struggle against the death penalty is on display in a 50-piece exhibit at the University of Geneva’s Unimail campus from 2 February. The exhibit will move to the CICG conference centre 24 February to coincide with the opening of the 4th World Congress against the death penalty, 24-26 February. The Congress has the support of the Swiss government.
The cartoons display is sponsored by the French abolitionist group Ensemble contre la peine de mort (ECPM) and the City of Geneva. The display opens officially 4 February at 17:30 with a welcome by Rémy Pagani, mayor of Geneva.
Links to other sites: Abolition site, World Coalition site
The president of Mongolia, Tsakhia Elbegdorj, has announced a moratorium on the death penalty and called on his country’s parliament to abolish it, saying the punishment degrades the country’s dignity where death is concerned. “Mongolia is a dignified country. . . and our citizens are dignified people”, he said 14 January in a speech to parliament.
Amnesty International, which campaigns against the death penalty, says that Mongolia is believed to have executed three people in 2009. Death row conditions are believed to be poor, and the procedure is shrouded in secrecy and a lack of transparency. Families are not notified in advance of the execution and the bodies are not turned over to the families, according to Amnesty.
Other links: Amnesty International, BBC, China Daily, Independent Online
Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has issued a call to abolish the death sentence, as a new US report shows that its use is decreasing there and that several states are considering ending its use. The 20th anniversary of the international death penalty treaty was marked by Pillay’s appeal in Geneva. The treaty calls for the universal abolition of capital punishment. Pillay’s office says that 140 countries no longer carry out the death penalty, and 72 countries have ratified the treaty’s Optional Protocol, which bars the death penalty.
The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), a monitoring group in Washington, DC in the US, shows in its annual report that 106 death sentences were issued in the US in 2009, down from a post-1976 high of 328 in 1994.
Russia’s decision to continue its ban on the death penalty was praised by the Council on Europe and media in Europe Thursday and Friday. The country’s Constitutional Court 18 November decided to continue indefinitely a country-wide moratorium on the death penalty, in place since 1999, which was scheduled to end in January 2010. Its rulings must be followed by all Russian courts, according to the Moscow Times. The government and the Kremlin have said they did not want executions begun again. Ten years ago the court decided that executions could take place only if all Russian regions had trials by jury in murder cases, and the last of the regions to implement this has been Chechnya, which is slated to start them in January.
Links to other sites: die Welte, Moscow Times, Ria Novosti
Samantha Orobator of the UK was given a life sentence for drug trafficking rather than the usual death penalty, and it appears she may be able to serve her sentence in the UK, reports the Telegraph, UK. She was charged with carrying 680 grams of heroin when she tried to board a flight from Laos to Thailand in August 2008. While Laos sentences people to death for drugs there have reportedly been no executions since 1989. Orobator became pregnant while in prison, but little information about her situation has been made public.
Hesham Talaat Moustafa, former chairman of the Talaat Moustafa Group and a politician in Egypt, has been sentenced to death by hanging for ordering the murder of Lebanese singer Suzanne Tamim at her home in Dubai. The security guard who carried out the killing was also sentenced to death. The trial’s proceedings in Cairo, Egypt were gagged by the court when it provoked huge media interest in September 2008. The Talaat Moustafa Group is a major construction company. The singer and Moustafa had had an affair for three years, reports Al Jazeera, that ended several months before her murder, and she had recently married another man.
