Death Penalty News

LAST AUGUST a judge sentenced Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, to life in prison with no possibility of parole. It was the first time a court in New Zealand had meted out such a sentence. Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister and a liberal icon, took grim satisfaction in the punishment. “Today I hope is the last where we have any cause to hear or utter the name of the terrorist,” she said. Lifelong imprisonment seems to be spreading as a punishment for the worst crimes. In 2019 Serbia passed “Tijana’s law” in response to the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl. It allows judges to sentence some murderers and rapists of children to life in prison without parole. In June last year, after the gang rape of a 13-year-old girl by soldiers, Colombia overturned its constitutional ban on life sentences. Britain’s government recently proposed legislation to reduce the age at which judges can impose “whole-life” sentences from 21 to 18. The most heinous crime...

BELGRADE – In view of the European and World Day against the Death Penalty, foreign ministers of 42 countries, including Serbia, have issued a joint appeal for abolition of the death penalty. “Justice that kills is not justice. Convinced of the inherent inhumanity of the death penalty, the 42 countries represented here oppose its use under any circumstances anywhere in the world,” reads the appeal. The ministers underscore that the death penalty is not only an intolerable affront to human dignity, but its use goes hand in hand with numerous violations of the human rights of the condemned and their families and has no positive impact on crime prevention or security and does not in any way repair the harm done to the victims and their families. “Armed with these convictions, we take the opportunity presented by the 11th World Day against the Death Penalty to reiterate our unrelenting dedication to the abolition movement in Europe and all over the world,” the Serbian Minist...

Avram Nika The Government of Serbia has this week appealed to a US court to spare the life of one of its citizens, Avram Nika, currently facing execution in Nevada. In a ground-breaking intervention, the first of its kind for Serbia, the Government expresses “grave doubts as to the validity of the death sentence rendered against Mr Nika”, citing multiple failures by the State of Nevada. Serbia’s amicus curiae ('friend of the court') brief, submitted today to Nevada’s Washoe District Court, describes how Mr Nika - a marginalised Serbian Roma who couldn’t speak English - was denied translation and consular services by the Nevada authorities, rendering him unable to participate meaningfully in his trial. As a result, his defence was perfunctory, with no mitigating evidence presented, and his death sentence became a virtual certainty. Mr Nika, who is now being assisted by Reprieve’s EC Project, was sentenced to death in 1995 for murder. The Serbian consulate was not inf...

Ratko Mladic With video cameras capturing the moment, Gen. Ratko Mladic’s bodyguards handed out chocolates to Bosnian Muslim children, promising terrified women that the violence was over. “No one will be harmed,” the Bosnian Serb commander said on July 12, 1995, gently patting a young boy on the head. “You have nothing to fear. You will all be evacuated." As he spoke, thousands of his soldiers formed a vast cordon around the town of Srebrenica, a United Nations-protected “safe area” that had just fallen to his forces. Over the next 10 days, his soldiers hunted down, captured and summarily executed 8,000 men and boys from the town. Women were raped. And pleas for restraint from the international community were mocked. “Over 500 victims of the Srebrenica genocide were boys under the age of 18,” said Hasan Nuhanovic, a survivor from Srebrenica whose father, mother and brother were executed by Mr. Mladic’s forces. “They were 16, 17 years old when they were executed." The ...