Death Penalty News

An Iranian court has handed down a death sentence to a man detained in connection with the January 2026 protests in the northeastern city of Shandiz, the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) reported on Sunday. Hossein Rasouli-Nasab was sentenced by the Mashhad Revolutionary Court on charges including “ moharebeh ,” or waging war against God, HRANA said. The rights group said authorities had alleged that he committed moharebeh through participation in the destruction of public property and setting fire to religious centers. He was also accused of assembly and collusion against national security.

The EU has tightened the rules governing GSP+ trade preferences, but Pakistan’s record raises a harder question: whether Brussels is prepared to suspend market access when a major beneficiary fails to demonstrate sustained compliance with human rights, labour and governance obligations. The European Union has formally adopted revised rules for its Generalised Scheme of Preferences, strengthening the conditions attached to preferential market access for developing countries. The new framework will apply from 1 January 2027 and is intended to tighten monitoring, widen the list of international conventions, and make suspension of benefits easier in cases of serious violations.

Leaders in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, home to 72 million people, are considering punishing with the death penalty those who allegedly force people into religious conversion — a change that Christian leaders say could harm the state’s Christians, who already are persecuted under the law through false accusations. Mohan Yadav, chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, said March 8 that he plans to amend the state’s anti-conversion law to capitally punish those found to be fraudulently forcing people to convert, adding that “religious conversion will not be tolerated,” reported UCA News, a Catholic news outlet. Christians make up just 0.27% of the population in Madhya Pradesh, UCA News said.

Prime minister’s aide tells The Media Line that Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are not being misused against minority groups Minorities in Pakistan enjoy equal human rights to other citizens and “there is no misuse of the blasphemy laws against them,” Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi, a religious cleric and the Pakistani prime minister’s special representative on interfaith harmony and the Middle East, told The Media Line. Ashrafi was responding to a report released this week by the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, which recommended that 12 nations remain on the list of countries of concern for religious freedom, among them Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Speaking of Pakistan, the report stated that the coalition government led by Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif, which took office in mid-April 2022, had “weaponized the country’s blasphemy laws against former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his cabinet members.”

Pakistan has received 340 recommendations from UN member states on its 4th periodic report on the human rights situation in the country, and the government will examine these recommendations and report back to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in its forthcoming meeting. A draft report prepared on Wednesday by the Working Group on Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, available with Dawn, stated: “All conclusions and/or recommendations contained in the present report reflect the position of the submitting state(s) and/or the state under review. They should not be construed as endorsed by the Working Group as a whole.”

Despite international condemnation over Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws, which carry the death penalty, observers note that Christians continue to become common targets of discrimination of the laws, note observers. ANI -- Despite international condemnation over Pakistan's draconian blasphemy laws, which carry the death penalty, observers note that Christians continue to become common targets of discrimination of the laws, note observers. According to Pakistan Today, activists say that a persistent, apparently without reason, discrimination has turned into persecution against Christians, which is seen in cases where allegations are mostly baseless. "More than 90 per cent of the country's Christians reside in Punjab. And 60 per cent live in villages, and in most cases are more indigenous to their areas than Muslims. Blasphemy and desecration of the Quran are used against them, but the latter is used against them collectively, followed by organised destruction of pro...

Click here to Google translate this article into your own language Les proches et avocats de Fabien Azoulay, un Français condamné à 16 ans de prison par la justice turque pour détention de stupéfiants, se disent inquiets pour la sécurité du détenu et exigent son transfert en France. "Il a été victime de violences aggravées commises par un codétenu, qui lui a infligé des brûlures en raison de son homosexualité et de son appartenance à la religion juive", ont indiqué lundi dans un communiqué ses avocats, évoquant pour la première fois publiquement le cas de ce Français de 43 ans, détenu depuis quatre ans en Turquie. Lors d'un court voyage en 2017 à Istanbul pour réaliser des implants capillaires, Fabien Azoulay avait été arrêté pour avoir acheté sur internet une fiole de GBL, un solvant utilisé comme stimulant. "C'est un détergent pour les jantes de voiture, qui avait été interdit en Turquie six mois plus tôt, ce qu'ignorait mon client. Il s'est fait livre...

Last year Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Catholic woman accused of blasphemy against Islam, arrived to make a new life in Canada with her family. After being convicted and sentenced to death, she had languished in jail for ten years. Her lawyers received death threats. But Asia Bibi is far from being the only Pakistani Christian convicted on trumped-up charges of blasphemy. An illiterate Catholic couple, Shafqat Emmanuel and Shagfuta Kausar, were charged with blasphemy in 2013 and sentenced to be hanged in 2014. Ever since, they have been in prison. A verdict on their appeal was to have been handed down earlier this month, but it was delayed — again. The innocent couple has been on death row for six years. Supporters say that the allegations are baseless. The couple are illiterate in both Urdu, the local language, and English. Yet they were accused of sending a text message written in English. They have denied the charges. Shafqat and Shagfuta are simple, struggling village ...