Death Penalty News

Syria's state-run news agency SANA says President Bashar Assad has granted amnesty for all crimes committed before Sept. 14. According to the pardon issued Sunday, life-long terms would replace death sentences, and a 20-year-long sentence at hard labor would replace life-long sentences at hard labor, and a 20-year sentence would replace long-life sentences. Prisoners with incurable diseases including cancer would be freed. The decree stipulates for granting a general amnesty for military deserters to turn themselves in within 3 months for those inside the country, and 6 months for those outside the country. Similar amnesties have been issued on several occasions - most recently last year - since Syria's conflict began in March 2011. Syrian opposition sources said that more than 500,000 prisoners remain inside the prisons of the Syrian regime. A report issued by the rights group on 30 April stated that 14,009 prisoners had been killed due to severe tor...

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – France’s Minister of Justice told the media this week that she was in discussions with other European governments about the possibility of setting up an international court in Iraq to try foreigners who are accused of traveling to Iraq and Syria to join the Islamic State.   Nicole Belloubet made the comments to Radio Monte Carlo, stressing that such a plan was in its earliest stages, saying, “This is speculation voiced by many of my counterparts, interior ministers and justice ministers alike, at the European level.” European states have been reluctant to repatriate their citizens being charged with becoming Islamic State members or fighters who are now being held in camps in Syria run by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), as well the detainees' children. Many nations in the EU fear that due to the lack of evidence, Islamic State supporters could be quickly released once they appear in court after returning home. As such, the no...

The collapse of the physical caliphate of ISIS (Daesh) in Iraq and Syria has not led to the demise of Salafi-jihadi terrorism, but given rise to a set of problems relating to the management of scores of detained ISIS foreign fighters. Essentially, how should the international community deal with these foreign citizens who had travelled to the Levant to join ISIS? While countries are reluctant to allow their citizens, who became foreign fighters to return home, these countries have expressed concerns with the way that their citizens are being prosecuted in Iraq (or a third country). There are no clear positions and no clear solutions about the management of detained ISIS foreign fighters. For example, France reportedly said that the prosecution of French ISIS fighters in Iraq is “a sovereign matter for Iraq” but “opposed in principle to the death penalty.” Human rights groups said that the court trials in Iraq depend on “circumstantial evidence or confessions obtained under t...