Death Penalty News

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); November 25, 2023: Newly obtained information shows that Hamidreza Azari was 16 years old at the time of the alleged murder he was executed for in Sabzevar Prison. According to newly obtained documents witnessed by Iran Human Rights, Hamidreza Azari who was executed in Sabzevar Prison on 24 November, was a juvenile offender and 17 at the time of execution. He was born on 27 July 2006 and was alleged to have committed the murder on 28 April 2023, when he was 16 years and 8 months old.

Cuba's one-party legislature Sunday passed a new Penal Code, which was considered to be “modern” and adjusted to the country's socialist “reality,” it was announced in Havana. Although the new legal instrument was designed in tune with international criteria on human rights according to local authorities, the death penalty was not entirely removed and may still be applied. “The norm is of extraordinary relevance in the robustness of Cuba as a socialist state of law, a modern criminal law, adjusted to the socioeconomic realities and updated with the Constitution and other legal provisions,” Ruben Remigio Ferro, president of the People's Supreme Court, told the National Assembly of People's Power, the national parliamentary body. The new code provides for penalties that range from life imprisonment to 30-year prison sentences for the most serious crimes. It also maintains the death penalty for 23 extremely serious offenses , it was reported. Offenders are accountable sinc...

China’s revised criminal law came into effect on March 1 with a raft of new provisions criminalizing a number of actions that were previously minor offenses. The new amendment has added or adjusted 47 clauses, which legal experts describe as “a rather significant change.” The changes reflect hot-button issues from recent years including lowering the age of criminal responsibility, better protecting minors, insulting martyrs, and attacking police officers. Here’s a look at some of the most important changes to China’s criminal law: Attacking the police According to the new amendment, an individual found guilty of attacking an on-duty police officer shall be sentenced to up to three years in prison, while those using guns, knives, or vehicles against officers can face up to seven years. Previously, there was no law pertaining to attacks against the police specifically. Instead, such cases were normally classified as “obstruction of official duties” and resulted in fines as well as up t...

TOKYO -- From April 2022, the age of majority, or the age one is considered a legal adult, in Japan will lower from 20 to 18. While this leaves the status of important annual rituals such as coming-of-age ceremonies in limbo, the shift will allow younger people a wider range of privileges such as the ability to vote, own a passport, and apply for a credit card. However, the implications of the shift will also reverberate in another important part of Japanese society: juvenile criminal law. Recently, the Abe administration has entered a round of inner party discussions over amending a law protecting the privacy of juvenile criminals. In prior years, if the perpetrator of a serious crime was younger than the age of 20, their names as well as photos were censored from mass media. Given the government’s push to lower the age of legal adulthood to 18, it comes to no surprise that the age threshold for withholding a criminal’s name from the news will be lowered as well. The ne...

Allies of strongman president score victories in elections, leaving the Senate at his mercy Rodrigo Duterte has won a sweeping victory in mid-term elections in the Philippines, further consolidating his power and popularity and paving the way for the introduction of controversial reforms. The president was elected on a populist wave in 2016 and the results demonstrate how little his popularity has dipped over the past three years, despite him achieving international notoriety over a war on drugs that has resulted in thousands of deaths, and his misogynist and anti-religious public remarks. Up for grabs in the mid-terms were 12 Senate seats, nearly 300 seats in the House of Representatives and thousands of local posts, including mayor and governor positions. Pro-Duterte candidates scored victories in significant numbers. Most significantly, nine pro-Duterte candidates won Senate seats, meaning the 24-seat upper house is now firmly under his grip. The liberal oppositio...

MANILA: Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is expected to strengthen his grip on power in midterm polls next week, experts say, clearing a possible path to restoring the death penalty and advancing his pledge to rewrite the constitution. Duterte has found international infamy for his foul-mouthed tirades, but remains hugely popular among Filipinos fed up with the country's dysfunction and elite politicians. He has pledged to bring back capital punishment for drug-related crimes as part of a deadly crackdown on narcotics in which thousands of alleged pushers and users have already been killed. Duterte's tough-on-crime platform - which also includes lowering the age of criminal responsibility from 15 to 12 - was key to his landslide election victory in 2016. Among the 18,000 posts up for grabs on Monday are half of the seats in the upper house Senate, which has stopped cold some of Duterte's most controversial policy initiatives. Opinion polls suggest...

MANILA (Reuters) - Senators in the Philippines on Tuesday joined activists and child protection groups in condemning a lower house move to reduce the age of criminal liability from 15 to nine, calling it extreme and unjust. The proposal has President Rodrigo Duterte's support and is being revived by his Congressional allies, having been filed on his inauguration day in 2016 along with a bid to re-introduce the death penalty - moves touting his crime-busting credentials. The plan was approved on Monday by the lower house's justice committee, but still needs several readings before a house vote. It would then require counterpart legislation and approval of the Senate, members of which appear less supportive. "It is anti-family, anti-poor and simply unjust. Moreover, it will promote a heartless and ruthless society that has no regard for its own people," said Antonio Trillanes, one of Duterte's biggest critics. Risa Hontiveros said the idea went ag...

The House of Representatives justice committee has batted for the measure overhauling the country's 85-year old Revised Penal Code, renaming penalties, adjusting fines, requiring joint civil and criminal proceedings, introducing community service, and lowering the minimum age of criminal liability to 12 years. In a statement, committee chair Rep. Reynaldo Umali sought the speedy passage of House Bill No. 6204, which seeks to replace Book 1, or the first 113 articles of the 367-article RPC. Book 1 was trimmed to just 78 articles. Umali was quoted in the statement as saying that legal complications and difficulty have arisen from the passage of special penal laws in the past eight decades. "Now we can hardly keep track of the exact number of penal laws that we have and there is difficulty in determining which law or laws are to be used to prosecute a particular criminal conduct," Umali added. Book 1 covers the "general principles on the application o...