Death Penalty News

The public execution of two protesters in Isfahan has renewed calls for the German city of Freiburg to end its 25-year twinning with the Iranian city, with activists arguing the partnership lends legitimacy to a state punishing dissent with the death penalty. The demands follow the executions of Amirhossein Safari and Abolfazl Sepahi in Isfahan's Alikhani Square in late July. Witnesses reported clashes between security forces and people who gathered to protest the hangings. Freiburg, a university city in southwestern Germany, is the only municipality in the country to maintain a formal partnership with an Iranian city. Iranian activists have long argued that the arrangement, established in 2000, legitimizes the Islamic Republic despite its human rights record.

Three years after the rape and murder of a US tourist near Neuschwanstein Castle, the convicted man, also from the United States, is contesting his extradition from Germany. The 33-year-old pushed two young women down a slope of around 50 metres during a visit to the world-famous castle. A 21-year-old later died in hospital and her friend was injured. The man raped and strangled the 21-year-old before pushing her over the edge. Kempten Regional Court sentenced him to life in prison for murder, attempted murder and rape resulting in death. The foreigners' office in the area then issued a deportation order against the convicted murderer.

Post Oct 7th, 2023, first came the words of outrage followed by encouragement and sympathy. Numerous heads of state flew in to tour Gaza-adjacent Israeli communities, where 1,200 men women and children were slaughtered, raped, beheaded, and taken hostage by Hamas bloodthirsty terrorists. Then an eerie silence as Hamas supporters, extreme haters of Israel, al Jazeera and a tsunami of social media bots, flipped the script, embedding Israel as the evil doer. Their crime? Counterattacking against Hamas and its 500 km underground city of terror. UN agencies, pious international courts, special rapporteurs, human rights NGOs, BBC-led hit pieces and social media bots and influencers, demonized a traumatized Jewish nation and taught the world to spell Zionist=N-A-Z-I.

ALGIERS , Nov. 12 (DPN) — Franco-Algerian novelist and dissident Boualem Sansal was released from prison on Tuesday after a personal intervention by Germany’s president , bringing to an end nearly a year of detention that had strained Algeria’s relations with Europe . Sansal, 81, a longtime critic of Algeria’s ruling establishment , had been arrested in November 2024 and sentenced to five years in prison on national security charges that human rights organizations denounced as politically motivated. Observers described his trial as arbitrary and lacking due process, with lawyers and family members often denied access during his detention.

Iran Human Rights (IHRNGO); November 2, 2024: Amid escalating tensions between Iran and Israel, and under the cover of war propaganda, the Islamic Republic carried out at least 166 executions in October alone. This marks the highest number of executions recorded in a single month since Iran Human Rights began documenting executions in 2007. Among those executed were 13 Afghan nationals, six women, and an Iranian-German citizen.

In Germany, all three consulates general of Iran will be closed in response to the execution of the German-Iranian citizen Jamshid Sharmakhd This was reported by German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Tagesschau reports. Iranian consulates will be closed in Frankfurt, Munich and Hamburg. The Iranian embassy in Berlin will continue to work. Those of the 32 consulate employees who do not have German citizenship will have to leave Germany.

He was sentenced to death in February 2023 for “corruption on Earth,” and was accused of being involved in the 2008 bombing of a Shiite mosque in Shiraz that led to the deaths of 14 people and over 200 others injured. Iran executed a 69-year-old German-Iranian software developer and US resident, Jamshid Sharmahd on Monday, October 28, following years of imprisonment.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Tuesday pardoned a German man facing the death penalty, the country's state news agency reported. Lukashenko "took the decision to pardon the German citizen Rico Krieger ... taking into account all the circumstances," Belta news agency reported, citing the president's press service. Krieger, 30, had been shown on Belarusian public television last week, saying "I really hope that President [Alexander] Lukashenko will forgive me and pardon me," according to a statement quoted by the Russian news agency TASS.

A German citizen who was sentenced to death in Belarus has asked Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko for mercy in a video broadcast on state television. A 30-year-old German man sentenced to death in Belarus asked for pardon from President Alexander Lukashenko on Thursday in a television appearance. 

Belarus is the last country in Europe still to apply the death penalty, executing several people each year by firing squad.

While a green wave sweeps the Western world, there are still some countries that have harsh penalties for cannabis possession. From prison time to beheadings, these are some of the countries you don't want to get caught with weed. In recent years, the world has seen a general loosening of cannabis laws, concerning both medicinal and recreational use of the drug. Today, over 60 countries have legalised cannabis for medicinal purposes while, earlier this year, Germany finally introduced legislation to legalise recreational cannabis, becoming just the third country in the world to do so.

Before the storm In 1898, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld circulated a petition to abolish [Paragraph 175 criminalizing homosexual relations in Germany]. He obtained the signatures of prominent writers, lawyers, politicians, and church dignitaries. The petition was discussed in the Reichstag and rejected. Only the Social Democratic Party, under the guidance of August Bebel, pleaded the reform. Most deputies were outraged and did not hide their abhorrence.

A Ho Chi Min City (HCMC) court sentenced local man Nguyen Liao Hung Tran, 30, to death for having 5.8 kg of drugs delivered to him from Germany by mail. He was sentenced for transportation and illegal possession of drugs. Tran was at home in District 4 on the afternoon of May 13, 2022, when a post office employee called him on the phone and said: "Is this Lan Anh? There are two boxes of goods sent to you from abroad. We’re going to deliver them to you in 30-45 minutes."

For the first time, the Vatican has given an entire family one of Catholicism's highest honors. Jozef Ulma, his wife Wiktoria and their seven children were killed by Nazis in 1944 along with eight Jews they were hiding. The Vatican on Sunday beatified an entire family for the first time to honor it for giving shelter to Jews during World War II while Poland was under German occupation. Jozef Ulma, 44, his pregnant wife Wiktoria, 31, and their children, all under 8 years of age, were killed by German police on March 24, 1944, after being betrayed to Nazi authorities for sheltering eight Jewish people in their attic. The eight Jews were also killed.

When leniency goes too far... BERLIN (AP) — A Munich court on Tuesday sentenced a German woman who was a member of the Islamic State group to 14 years in prison for allowing a 5-year-old Yazidi girl she and her husband kept as a slave in Iraq to die of thirst in the sun. [ Are we living on the same planet????? — DPN] The decision replaced an earlier prison sentence of 10 years.  A German appeals court had ordered a new sentencing hearing for the woman, who has been identified only as Jennifer W. in line with German privacy rules, after the country's Federal Court of Justice threw out an appeal by the defendant but partly approved an appeal by prosecutors. 

Islamabad [Pakistan], August 12 (ANI): Given that Pakistan has reneged on various international agreements that include those relating to good governance, human rights and labour rights, the European Union's (EU) 10-year preferential trade agreement, GSP Plus, may not be extended, according to the Insideover. As envisaged by the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) scheme, the country has also failed to bring about sustained development and poverty reduction in Pakistan.

BERLIN (AP) — The daughter of a California-based man sentenced to death in Iran has asked authorities in Germany to open criminal proceedings against members of the Iranian judiciary. The family of Jamshid Sharmahd, who is a German-Iranian citizen, says he was abducted by Iran while staying in Dubai three years ago. Iranian authorities accused him of planning a 2008 attack on a mosque that killed 14 people and wounded over 200 others. He was sentenced to death earlier this year. German and European diplomats have condemned the verdict, which comes amid an increase in executions by Iran. Germany follows the principle of universal jurisdiction, under which authorities can investigate serious crimes committed elsewhere in the world.

Iran has executed a Swedish-Iranian man accused of being behind a deadly 2018 attack on a military parade. Habib Chaab was a founder of a separatist group calling for independence for ethnic Arabs in Iran's south-western Khuzestan province. He had been living in exile in Sweden for a decade when he was abducted by Iranian agents in Turkey in 2020. Sweden's Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said his government had urged Iran not to execute Chaab. "The death penalty is an inhuman and irreversible punishment and Sweden, together with the rest of the EU, condemns its application under all circumstances," he said.

The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), with the support of the Foreign Office of the Federal Government of Germany, recently undertook a project examining the U.S. death penalty through a human rights lens.  DPIC has added a series of human rights pages to its website, reframing three aspects of the death penalty – race, conditions of confinement, and executions – in light of human rights norms and treaties. The page on U.S. executions highlights various human rights issues related to methods of execution, including lethal injection, and the international community’s response.  The conditions of confinement page discusses ongoing practices that vary from the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners , more commonly known as the “Nelson Mandela rules.” 

The German Baptist Church in Pforzheim has been the centre of controversy since it was discovered that they believe that gay people deserve the death penalty. Other churches distance themselves from the statements and call for criminal charges. “We believe that homosexuality is a sin and a shame that God punishes with the death penalty”, the website of the Baptists in Pforzheim reads. The believers base this view on several Bible texts, such as Leviticus 20,13, Romans 1,31, 2 Peter 2,6, and Jude 7. In a letter to Pforzheimer Zeitung, pastor Anselm Urban explains that Leviticus clearly says that men who lie together should be put to death. He points out that the illness of AIDS proves that God condemns gay people, as it is “almost exclusively transmitted by sodomites.”