Death Penalty News

WASHINGTON/PENTAGON - Efforts to deliver an enduring defeat to the Islamic State may be in danger because of difficulties with bringing the terror group’s female members and associates to justice. Describing the situation as dire, a new analysis from the United Nations’ Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate [CTED] warns too few of these IS women are being held to account, as many countries have been reluctant to repatriate them. “Women are the demographic group with the lowest overall rate of return from the conflict zone in Iraq and the Syrian Arab Republic,” according to the CTED report issued Wednesday, based on a study of 80 U.N. member states. “Within judicial systems, there is an urgent need for training and capacity-building on gender-sensitive approaches to investigations and prosecutions,” the report added. Exactly how many women members of IS have been prosecuted or could be charged with crimes is difficult to say. The CTED analysis said for...

Shamima Begum, now twenty, went to war-torn Syria, as a fifteen-year-old, to join the Islamic State as an ISIS bride Shamima Begum, a British citizen of Bangladeshi origin, went to the Syrian war zone, in 2015.  She went to Raqqa in northern Syria attracted by the Islamic State, where she married a Dutch convert fighter, had three children with him and stayed as an ISIS bride. Last February, the 20-year-old was found in the al-Hawl camp in northern Syria and was immediately stripped off her British citizenship.  She had appealed against the government's decision over her citizenship, but lost the first stage of it, on February 7. Shamima Begum loses appeal for her citizenship In February last year, the former British Home Secretary Sajid Javid stripped her UK citizenship.  She got to know about the decision in an interview with ITV News, the decision which she described as "hard to swallow", "upsetting, frustrating and unjust".  ...

Five French jihadists sentenced to death in Iraq have appealed to the UN to pressure France to bring them home, their lawyer has said, adding they were suffering inhumane treatment. The prisoners are suffering "inhumane and degrading treatment inside Iraq's prisons," lawyer Nabil Boudi told AFP Thursday. The French government is “perfectly informed of the situation” but has done nothing to stop it,” he alleged, emphasising that the state had a duty to offer consular protection to “all French citizens, without exception.” The five inmates are Brahim Nejara, Bilel Kabaoui, Leonard Lopez, Fodil Tahar Aouidate and Mourad Delhomme. They were among 11 jihadists sentenced to death last year in Iraq after being charged with belonging to the Islamic State armed group. Boudi has appealed to the United Nations Committee against Torture, which monitors the implementation by member states of the UN Convention against Torture, to "take provisional protective mea...

On a busy day, Judge Ahmed might send several men to their deaths before lunchtime.  At the Baghdad court where he works, he has presided over more than a thousand trials of suspected Isis members.  Prisoners accused of belonging to one of the world’s most brutal terror organisations shuffle through the hallways wearing bright orange jumpsuits. They wait silently outside his courtroom and listen to those who go before them. The judge, who declined to give his name for security reasons, has seen before him unrepentant radicals and hardened killers, liars and psychopaths. He has also heard from defendants who say they joined the group just to survive.  He has seen young men from Europe, who travelled thousands of miles to join the jihadi group at the height of its power and survived long enough to see its fall. And for some time now, he has been readying himself to deal with the small number of British prisoners currently held in Syria, whose fate has bee...

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to send back foreign citizens who supported the Islamic State is handing Western Europe a problem it had hoped to avoid. PARIS — As Turkey followed through on its threat to release more Islamic State detainees last week, Western European nations were confronted with a problem they had long sought to avoid: what to do about the potential return of radicalized, often battle-hardened Europeans to countries that absolutely do not want them back. Faced with fierce popular opposition to the repatriation of such detainees and fears over the long-term threat they could pose back home, European leaders have sought alternative ways to prosecute them — in an international tribunal, on Iraqi soil, anywhere but on the Continent. But President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, made more powerful by a sudden shift in American policy, is determined to foist the problem of the captured European Islamic State fighters back on the countries they came...

If Iraq were to put Dutch jihadis on trial and sentence them to death the VVD* would be prepared to accept it, MP Dilan Yesilgoz Zegerius told parliament during Wednesday’s debate about preventing Dutch jihadis from returning to this country.  Asked if the VVD would be prepared to drop its opposition to the death penalty if Dutch jihadis were tried by an Iraqi tribunal, Yesilgoz reiterated her party and the government’s opposition.  She continued: ‘But there comes a moment when we have to look at whether this is ot the ultimate consequence of what is going on here… These people went willingly to the caliphate … at a time when the death penalty operated in Iraq.’  If they now end up in the Iraqi justice system and the death penalty is the ultimate consequence then I think – yes, the VVD thinks – that we should be able to talk about it.’  Efforts to create an international tribunal in Iraq, which were initiated by foreign minister Stef Blok during a ...

France has a plan for dealing with European Islamic State fighters: get Iraq to handle them. While competing political train wrecks dominate the headlines in the U.S. and the U.K., the French foreign minister recently took a trip to Baghdad in an attempt to warehouse European jihadis, particularly French ones, far away from the continent. Nowhere in Western Europe is the security threat of the United States’s Syria withdrawal more pronounced than in France. The vulnerability to escape and jailbreak of the makeshift Kurdish prisons holding alleged Islamic State members has the fate of 200 French adults (60 of whom are feared jihadis) and 300 French children in question. Around 1,900 French nationals have traveled to join the Islamic State in Syria— more than double the number from any of its Western European peers. France has also been uniquely affected by foreign fighter violence. On a Friday night in Paris almost four years ago, French and Belgian nationals (many of whom ha...

HASAKAH, Syria  — They are the remains of the Islamic State, a once sprawling kingdom built by foot soldiers from around the world to terrorize and enslave those they conquered. Hollow-eyed and gaunt, the men and boys look broken. Days are spent in halting conversation with cellmates who still have the energy, or staring blankly across the teeming, fetid cells. Many have lost limbs in the battles that led them here. Others have lost eyes and ears, a result, they said, of airstrikes. As Islamist militants fought in March for their last square mile in eastern Syria, fighters and families from more than 60 countries streamed out of their stronghold to surrender into the custody of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led force. Eight months on, more than 10,000 men and children are still crammed into at least 25 makeshift prisons, lingering in legal twilight. The Kurdish-led force that holds them does not have the capacity to investigate or try them, and ...