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Indonesia | 14 years on death row: Timeline of Mary Jane Veloso’s ordeal and fight for justice

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MANILA, Philippines — The case of Mary Jane Veloso, a Filipina on death row in Indonesia for drug trafficking, has spanned over a decade and remains one of the most high-profile legal battles involving an overseas Filipino worker. Veloso was arrested on April 25, 2010, at Adisucipto International Airport in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, after she was found in possession of more than 2.6 kilograms of heroin. She was sentenced to death in October – just six months after her arrest. Indonesia’s Supreme Court upheld the penalty in May 2011.

Executing Human Dignity: U.S. Death Penalty System Dominates IACHR Report

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The U.S. death penalty system does not meet the rigid requirements of international human rights law: as we note in our statement, the penalty is applied in an arbitrary and discriminatory manner without affording vital due process rights such as access to effective counsel and the right to remedy to halt executions - not to mention that methods of execution and death row conditions have been condemned as cruel, inhuman, or degrading.

The U.S. cannot continue to bury its head in the sand and ignore the evolving international consensus against the death penalty, or discount sound jurisprudence from around the world, which clearly shakes the legal and moral foundation of the penalty.

But people are still being executed. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, as of December 2012, 1,320 people have been executed since the death penalty was restored in 1976. Yet international scrutiny is mounting and the U.S. is left in the sorry company of countries like China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen as top imposers of the death penalty.

Click here to read the full article

Source: ACLU, April 21, 2013
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