Death Penalty News

A Bangkok court convicted Yusufu Mieraili and Bilal Mohammed of premeditated and attempted murder for their role in planting a bomb at the popular Erawan Shrine in the capital's commercial heart. The blast tore apart the site where worshippers and tourists had gathered, wounding more than 100 people and leaving the shrine to the Thai representation of Brahma littered with motorbike fragments and singed debris.

Manuel Guerrero Aviña, a dual British-Mexican citizen, has been arrested in Qatar after falling victim to a police-led Grindr sting. The former British Airways manager was detained on 4 February 2024 after replying to a fake message on the app. Gay sex in the conservative Muslim country is punishable by up to seven years in prison, and carries the death penalty under Sharia law, although this is unenforced.

Koh Samui, Thailand, Oct 26 (EFE).- A court on the Thai island of Koh Samui on Thursday postponed the hearing of murder-accused Spaniard Daniel Sancho until next month. Sancho, 29, has been charged in the case of the murder and dismemberment of Colombian surgeon Edwin Arrieta on the neighboring island of Koh Phangan in August. Thursday’s hearing, which began at 9 am local time (GMT+7) with Sancho in attendance, was first postponed by the court for a few hours, and then until Nov. 13, due to the defendant’s request for a Spanish interpreter.

Jakarta (ANTARA) - As many as 168 Indonesian citizens are facing death penalty overseas for various crimes, according to data from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as of August 2023. Of the total cases, 157 were recorded in Malaysia, four cases in the United Arab Emirates, three cases in Saudi Arabia and Laos respectively, and one case in Vietnam, the ministry's Director of Protection for Indonesian Citizens and Indonesian Legal Entities Judha Nugraha noted. Nugraha remarked in a press briefing here on Friday that 110 of them were involved in drug-related crimes and 58 others were convicted in murder cases. During the 2011-2022 period, the ministry had recorded that 519 Indonesians overseas were prevented from executions.

A Singaporean man who is due to be hanged this week for abetting an attempt to smuggle cannabis is one of a growing number of death row prisoners who have to represent themselves after their appeals because they cannot access lawyers, activists have said. Tangaraju Suppiah, 46, was sentenced to death in 2018 after a judge found he was the owner of a phone number used to coordinate an attempt to traffic 1 kilogram of cannabis. He is due to be executed on Wednesday. Campaigners have cited various concerns over the handling of his case, including claims made in court that the Tamil speaker was questioned by the police in English without legal counsel and without an interpreter. Last November, when Tangaraju filed an application for his case to be reviewed after an unsuccessful appeal, he represented himself in court.

Rights activists and family members say there were loopholes in the case and that Tangaraju never handled the drugs. The family of a Singaporean man due to be hanged next week over a kilogram of cannabis pleaded for clemency from the authorities Sunday and urged a retrial. Tangaraju Suppiah, 46, was sentenced to death in 2018 for conspiring to smuggle the drugs and the Court of Appeal has upheld his sentence which is scheduled to be carried out on Wednesday. "We don't think my brother's had a fair trial... I have faith the president will read all our petitions," his sister Leelavathy Suppiah told reporters in Tamil at a news conference.

On 19 April, Tangaraju s/o Suppiah and his family were informed that his hanging had been scheduled for 26 April. Rocky called in the afternoon. "I have some bad news," he said. I immediately knew what he was going to say. I just didn't know whose name I would hear on the line next. "Tangaraju got an execution notice today." The last execution in Singapore took place in October last year. Since then, death row prisoners, their loved ones, and abolitionists have had a short reprieve after a brutal year in which 11 men were hanged for drug offences in about a seven-month period. We were cautiously hopeful that two ongoing legal challenges, involving multiple death row prisoners, would stall executions for a while more. But we could never really let go of the breath we'd been holding — with the Singapore government dead set on defending capital punishment and their war on drugs, we knew that it was just a matter of time before they'd be back to their murder...

Qatari authorities are ignoring international law by failing to inform embassies when their citizens are arrested, detained or are pending trial for a death sentence. Our new data reveals that between 2016 and 2021 at least 21 people were under sentence of death in Qatar. Of the 21, only three cases involved Qatari nationals and only one involved a woman (who was accused of murder). The remaining 18 were made up of foreign nationals: seven from India, two from Nepal, five from Bangladesh, one Tunisian and three Asians of unknown nationality. Of these cases, 17 related to homicide and one a conviction for drug trafficking. The majority of the murder cases involved male migrant labourers from South Asia, convicted of crimes related to their precarious migrant worker status. The remaining murder cases involved one Tunisian man, and two defendants’ where the nationalities were unknown. In December 2017, male Nepalese migrant worker Anil Chaudhary was sentenced to death for murdering a Qata...

Jakarta, Thu, September 1, 2022 Indonesia’s war on drugs has been a feature of the country’s heavy-handed criminal justice system. Over half of Indonesia’s 404 death row inmates are facing execution for drug-related charges, making it — alongside countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia — one of the most dangerous countries in the world to possess or sell drugs. And the crackdown has recently gained strength: of Indonesia’s 94 death sentences recorded since the start of the pandemic, 80 were for drug-related offences (seven of whom were foreign nationals).  Support for the ‘zero tolerance’ approach is partly based on the idea that Indonesia’s laws promote deterrence. However the data tell a different story. Since the most recent execution of a convicted drug offender in April 2016, prosecution for drug trafficking in Indonesia has kept rising. This suggests that the movement of drugs into Indonesia hasn’t slowed, despite a long and concentrated effort from authorities.   T...

The situation is particularly dire for foreign nationals who find themselves sentenced to death outside of their home countries. On March 30, Singapore executed Abdul Kahar bin Othman, a local man sentenced to death for drug offences and the first person to be executed in Singapore in since 2019. Othman had been unable to appeal his execution because he did not have a lawyer. 8 of the 35 countries that still retain the death penalty for drug offences are in South-east Asia and were responsible for a staggering 91.5 % of all confirmed death sentences given for drug offences worldwide, according to the Global Review 2021 from Harm Reduction International (HRI). The imposition of these death sentences is shrouded in secrecy and characterised by widespread human rights violations (HRI 2019), such as lack of access to legal representation (HRI 2020), as in Othman's case. Too often, there are reports of torture, ill treatment and coerced confession. The situation is particularly dire for...

Saudi authorities’ execution of 81 men on March 12, 2022 was its largest mass execution in years despite recent promises to curtail its use of the death penalty, Human Rights Watch said today. Rampant and systemic abuses in Saudi Arabia’s criminal justice system suggest it is highly unlikely that any of the men received a fair trial. Saudi activists told Human Rights Watch that 41 of the men belonged to the country’s Shia Muslim minority, who have long suffered systemic discrimination and violence by the government. Many Saudi Shia are serving lengthy sentences, are on death row, or have been executed for protest-related charges following patently unfair trials. “Saudi Arabia’s mass execution of 81 men this weekend was a brutal show of its autocratic rule , and a justice system that puts the fairness of their trials and sentencing into serious doubt,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The shocking callousness of their treatment is compounded by the...

In January, Malaysia’s Law Minister Wan Junaidi Tuanku Jaafar said the cabinet would discuss the findings of a study on alternatives to the mandatory death penalty, which applies to crimes including drug trafficking, treason, and murder. After almost two years without any progress on death penalty reform, this is a welcome development. For more than 40 years, Amnesty International has campaigned against the death penalty around the world, and more than two-thirds of countries have abolished it in law or in practice. Here’s why Malaysia – and other countries that retain the death penalty – should show human rights leadership and set an example by scrapping it once and for all. Simply put, governments should not kill people. Or as the United Nations Human Rights Committee has put it, “the death penalty cannot be reconciled with full respect for the right to life.” Every single human being has the inherent right to life and governments have an obligation to protect lives, not take them. T...

Jakarta (ANTARA) - The Foreign Affairs Ministry has detailed efforts made by the government to protect Indonesian citizens (WNI) from the death penalty abroad. "There are three principles that we adhere to protect Indonesian citizens which are regulated in the Minister of Foreign Affairs' Regulation Number 5 of 2018," Director for the Protection of Citizens and Legal Entities Overseas at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Judha Nugraha, said here on Monday. The first is prioritizing the responsible parties, he said. Second, the government does not take any criminal or civil responsibility, he added. Lastly, the protection is provided in accordance with national law, local state law, and customary international law, he continued. "We do not give impunity to our citizens who commit crimes abroad, but the duty of our state is to provide legal assistance," Nugraha remarked. The legal assistance is intended to ensure Indonesian citizens facing legal action in other cou...