Post date: Mar 04, 2013 6:15:10 PM
Human Rights Watch releases a new report on child executions. Yemen's penal code bans the practice, but HRW says that between 2007 and 2012, Yemen executed 15 young men and women who said they were under the age of 18 at the time of their offence.
SANAA, YEMEN (MARCH 4, 2013) (REUTERS) - Human Rights Watch released on Monday (March 4) a new report on child executions in Yemen.
Despite Yemen's penal code banning the practice, Human Rights Watch said thatYemen has executed at least 15 young male and female offenders, all aged under 18 when they committed the offences, in the last five years, urging the government to halt such executions."This new report documents how Yemen continues to deliver sentences of death and execute individuals for crimes they committed while they were children and before they turned the age 18," said Bede Sheppard, senior researcher for Asia in the Children's Rights Division in Human Rights Watch.
"In fact, only four countries in the past five years have executed juvenile offenders, they are Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and Yemen, he added.
The New York-based group also called on President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to reverse the execution orders of three juveniles on death row, whose appeals have been exhausted.
In a 30-page report, HRW cited the case of Hind al-Barti, executed by a government firing squad in Sanaa on murder charges. The group said the young woman's birth certificate showed she was 15 at the time of the alleged murder.
Barti told HRW in March 2012 that she had made a false confession after police officers beat her and threatened her with rape. Government authorities only gave her family a few hours' notice before her execution.
HRW said several other juvenile offenders it interviewed said they had faced threats, physical abuse and torture in custody, which they said led them to make false confessions.
Priyanka Motaparthy, a children's rights researcher at HRW, said the new Yemeni government must now take the opportunity to end such practices.
"From our point of view, this is a good opportunity for the new government of Yemen to break the past and repression. The people of Yemen are ready for a just future," she said.
Human Rights Minister Hooria Mashhour said Yemeni law prohibited the execution of offenders under the age of 18, but that people often lacked birth certificates to prove their age.
"Problems happen during procedures, during trials, where they treat the young offender as a fully responsible adult," Mashhour told Reuters, when asked about the HRW report.
"When rulings are issued and we, as Ministry of Human Rights, intervene, the judiciary consider our action as interference by the executive branch in their work," she added.
Hadi, who took office a year ago after popular protests forced former President Ali Abdullah Saleh to quit, is trying to reassert government authority in a nation that was lawless, chaotic and impoverished even before the political upheaval.
An official of a Yemeni group, the Seyaj Organisation for Childhood Protection, said it had managed to get the execution of an alleged child offender halted on Wednesday (February 27) at the last minute after contacting Hadi. The juvenile, Mohammed Abdulkarim Hazaa, was not among the three named by HRW as on death row.