August 1



LIBYA:

Illegitimate Show Trial Sentences Gaddafi's Son to Death


In 2007, candidate Obama said "(t)he president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."

Straightaway after entering office, he expanded drone attacks against Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. He increased troop strength in Afghanistan after pledging to end war by yearend 2009. US-led NATO aggression on Libya followed. Obama lied claiming Gaddafi "attack(ed) his (own) people. (So) we took ... swift steps ... to answer his aggression."

A litany of Big Lies followed. "Innocent people were targeted for killing," Obama blustered. "Hospital and ambulances were attacked."

"Journalists were arrested, sexually assaulted and killed ...Water for hundreds of thousands of people ... was shut off. Cities and towns were shelled. Mosques were destroyed."

"Gaddafi declared he would show no mercy to his own people" - willful Obama deception. He tried justifying the unjustifiable, adding "I authorized military action to stop the killing and enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1973."

International law is clear. Nations may not attack others except in self-defense - and only if UN Security Council authorized.

America wasn't attacked, nor other NATO countries. Gaddafi threatened no one, including his own people. The longer war raged, the more popular he became. Libyans rallied around him for safety and security - hoping he'd be able to restore peace and stability.

At war's end, he was brutally sodomized and murdered in cold blood. On November 19, 2011, his son Saif was arrested trying to flee Libya to safety, held captive by Zintan rebels, tortured, until tried in absentia in Tripoli and convicted by kangaroo tribunal proceedings affording him no chance for justice.

He was declared guilty by accusation - sentenced to death by firing squad along with 8 other former Gaddafi officials, including former intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi, and 2 former prime ministers, al-Baghdadi and Abuzaid Dorda.

A total of 32 defendants were tried - 23 got lesser sentences and fines. Attorney John Jones represented Saif. "It was clearly a show trial" for all defendants, he said. "It was basically a trial by militia" lasting 2 days - conducted by an illegitimate Islamist regime controlling Tripoli after ousting the US-installed one operating from Tobruk.

"Lawyers were intimidated," said Jones. "The judges were intimated. Lawyers had to leave the case." Controlled proceedings excluded the right to a proper defense. Only 2 intimidated witnesses for Saif were allowed. No evidence against him was presented.

Prosecutors relied solely on torture extracted information - what no legitimate tribunal permits. Transitional Justice and Rule of Law Division of the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) human rights director Claudio Cordone said:

"Concerns over the trial include the fact that several defendants were absent for a number of sessions. The evidence of criminal conduct was largely attributed to the defendants in general, with little effort to establish individual criminal responsibility."

"(I)t is particularly worrisome that the court handed down 9 death sentences. International standards require that death sentences may only be imposed after proceedings that meet the highest level of respect for fair trial standards. The United Nations opposes the imposition of the death penalty as a matter of principle."

Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Ravina Shamdasani, added:

"We had closely monitored the detention and trial and found that international fair trial standards had failed to be met. Among the key shortcomings is the failure to establish individual criminal responsibility in relation to specific crimes."

Other serious issues included lack of access to lawyers, torture and other forms of ill treatment, as well as illegitimate trials conducted in absentia.

An UNSMIL press release said "(d)uring their pre-trial detention defendants were denied access to lawyers and family for prolonged periods, and some reported that they were beaten or otherwise ill-treated, but UNSMIL is not aware of any investigation into these allegations."

"Many defendants were not represented by a lawyer during the pre-trial process, which deprived them of a crucial opportunity to establish their defence. Defence lawyers said they faced challenges in meeting their clients privately or accessing the full case file, and some said they received threats."

"They were constrained by the court to 2 or 3 witnesses per defendant and some said that witnesses were reluctant to appear in court due to fears about their safety. The court did not respond to defence counsel requests to examine prosecution witnesses."

US-led NATO turned Africa's most developed country into a cauldron of endless violence, deprivation and despair.

Tens of thousands were murdered in cold blood. Multiples more were injured and/or displaced. Violence, instability, insecurity and chaos reflect daily life. No end in sight looms. Millions of Libyans live in constant fear.

Obama bears full responsibility for raping, ravaging, destroying, and plundering a nation threatening no others. Anarchical charnel house conditions replaced it.

Dystopian harshness persists. Libya is a failed state. Central authority is absent. Public services aren't provided. Corruption and criminality are rampant. Conditions are in free fall. Human misery is extreme.

Libya is one of many high crimes on Obama's rap sheet. Perhaps he plans Libya 2.0 for Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Yemen. Longstanding US/Israeli plans to redraw the Middle East map suggest it.

(source: Stephen Lendman, thepeoplesvoice.org)




EGYPT:

Ibrahim Halawa trial: Irish Government should support call for investigation----Ireland should condemn Egypt's flagrant disregard for international standards


Today an Irish teenager lies abandoned to his fate in a Cairo prison, cut off from the world. Ibrahim Halawa was arrested in August 2013 near Cairo's Ramses Square by security forces, who bundled him into a squalid jail 2 days after they had carried out what Human Rights Watch has condemned as "one of the world's largest mass killings of demonstrators in a single day in recent history". It far exceeded the daily death toll in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or the number who died at the hands of Uzbek forces during the Andijan Massacre in 2005.

Arrested as a child

Security forces rounded up hundreds of unarmed people taking refuge in the Al-Fateh Mosque during protests, on the belief it was a sit-in by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The teenager's case file contains no evidence to link him to any of the crimes he is alleged to have committed. It gives no reason, other than his presence at the mosque, to arrest him at all. And yet Halawa was arrested - at 17 years of age, a child under international law - 1 of a group of 494, rounded up and charged with crimes that carry life imprisonment or the death penalty. He has been left to languish in rotten conditions ever since.

In the 2 years since his arrest he has been severely mistreated. There are persistent and credible allegations that he has been denied treatment for a gunshot wound to his hand (sustained when gunfire was used, unnecessarily, during his arrest); that he has been stripped naked and whipped with metal chains; that he has suffered routine verbal taunts about being executed - all at the hands of the prison officers supposedly responsible for his welfare.

Amnesty International report that such physical and mental mistreatment of prisoners has become widespread in Egypt. The Canadian journalist Mohamed Fahmy has described conditions in Tora Prison, where Halawa is held, as "psychologically unbearable".

In the 2 years since his arrest, Halawa has also been denied the most basic requirements of procedural fairness. He faces vague, generic charges; he does not have access to any of his lawyers; he cannot attend court hearings in his case; he will not be able to see or hear witnesses against him; and he cannot call his own witnesses.

The trial, due to start tomorrow, for him and 493 others, will inevitably be unfair. The backdrop is that the Egyptian courts have recently conducted many other flagrantly unfair mass trials, which the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, has described as "outrageous" and in clear breach of international human rights law.

For example, in March 2014, Minya Criminal Court sentenced 529 people to death for alleged participation in an attack on a police station. The trial took under an hour, the court prevented defence lawyers from presenting their case or calling witnesses, and the vast majority of defendants were tried and convicted in their absence.

In spite of his isolation, Ibrahim Halawa's name has become well known in Ireland. What is less well known are the steps which we, his lawyers, have taken to shine an international spotlight on the serious violations of his rights which he has endured, in advance of his trial.

We have recently filed applications with 3 United Nations bodies, requesting them to urgently investigate Halawa's case: the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; the Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; and the Special Rapporteur on Counterterrorism and Human Rights. The Irish Government has been asked to formally support these applications, but regrettably they have not agreed to do so.

An Irish citizen is held in arbitrary detention overseas, facing serious charges, and without access to his lawyers. Surely his Government should support calls for urgent investigation by expert international bodies of his detention, conditions and treatment.

Halawa has been receiving important consular support from the Irish Embassy in Cairo. But it is not enough. Why hasn't the Irish Government - at the highest level - been more outspoken in supporting its citizen and in condemning Egypt's grave disregard for international human rights?

When a US citizen, Mohamed Soltan, was imprisoned in Egypt for almost 2 years on charges that he supported an Islamist protest, the Obama administration was strident in its criticism.

In March 2014, a US State Department spokeswoman described the 529 death sentences in Minya as "shocking, unconscionable" and the use of mass trials as representing "a flagrant disregard for basic standards of justice". Secretary of State John Kerry made clear that US aid to Egypt - suspended in 2013 because of the military overthrow of a democratically elected government and the crackdown on peaceful protesters - would remain suspended unless the Egyptian government changed its ways.

Similarly, when journalist Peter Greste was let out of Egypt in February 2015, it was after public criticism of the system by the Australian government and repeated direct requests from Australian prime minister Tony Abbott to President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and by foreign minister Julie Bishop to her counterpart in Cairo.

Suffered enough

Halawa deserves no less energetic an effort from Ireland, no matter what its prospects of success. His fate has been the fate of thousands upon thousands of men, women and children in Egypt; all of them victims of the country's deeply politicised, blunt judicial system.

A great many of them, having reached the end of the road down which Halawa is being swept, have paid with their lives.

The Irish Government has a chance to prevent the same from happening to Halawa. He is innocent. He has suffered enough. Let's bring him home.

(source: Caoilfhionn Gallagher, Katie O'Byrne and Mark Wassouf are barristers from Doughty Street Chambers who act for Ibrahim Halawa and his family----The Irish Times)






CHAD:

Chad reintroduces death penalty. Which other countries use it?


Chad has beefed up its security in recent weeks after a spate of deadly attacks by Boko Haram.

Amid several suicide bombings in the past few months, Chad reintroduced the death penalty for acts of terrorism.

The Chadian parliament voted unanimously on Thursday to reauthorize the death penalty, 6 months after its abolition, the BBC reported.

Chad has beefed up its security in recent weeks, following a spate of deadly Boko Haram attacks.

On June 17, the country banned people from wearing burqas, or full-face veil, 2 days after 2 suicide bombers killed more than 30 people.

Despite the ban, on July 11 a Boko Haram suicide bomber man dressed in a woman's burqa blew himself up in the capital's main market, killing 15 people. Now Chad has aimed at arresting anyone who wears a burqa.

The country also opened a 2-week campaign against Boko Haram, during which the government says its forces killed 117 insurgents, Reuters reported.

Chad is the second country that has decided in the past few months to attempt to deter terrorism by resuming the death penalty.

Last March, Pakistan also lifted its moratorium on the death penalty in terror cases. On July 29, the United Nations urged Pakistan to halt executions.

The UN says the death penalty is an extreme form of punishment that, if used at all, should only be imposed for the most serious crimes, "after a fair trial that respects the most stringent due process guarantees as stipulated in international human rights law."

In July 2014, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said "Death penalty has no place in 21st century" and urged countries to stop the practice.

Currently, more than 160 UN member states have either abolished the death penalty or do not practice it. But there are still dozens of countries that carry out death sentences.

In December 2014, the Guardian analyzed Amnesty International data and concluded that at least 1,722 people were sentenced to death in 58 countries in 2012, which showed a decrease from 2011 with 1,923 executions in 63 countries worldwide.

The Guardian reported in 2013 at least 778 executions were carried out in 22 countries. In 2014, Amnesty International said the number of recorded death sentences has jumped by almost 500, compared to 2013.

Last year, China had the highest rate of the executions. Amnesty believes thousands were executed.

The other countries topping the list were Iran, with 289 officially and at least 454 unannounced executions; Saudi Arabia, with at least 90 executions; Iraq, with at least 61 executions; and the US, with 35 executions. The United States is the only G7 country that still executes people.

According to The Washington Post, Amnesty International data shows that in 2014 the number of death sentences handed down experienced a dramatic increase but there was a drop in the number of executions carried out.

(source: Christian Science Monitor)






GLOBAL:

Death penalty: is capital punishment morally justified?


The execution, by hanging, of Jakub Memon for his part in the 2003 Mumbai bombings invites us to revisit the vexed issue of capital punishment. Few topics incite such moral passion and controversy.

The world's religious communities are divided on the death penalty. Despite a seemingly unambiguous commitment to non-violence (or "Ahimsa") in both Hinduism and Buddhism, scholars within those traditions continue to debate the permissibility of lethal punishment. The Old Testament enjoins us to take an "eye for an eye" - the principle of lex talionis - while the New Testament exhorts us to "turn the other cheek". And while Islam is generally regarded as compatible with the death penalty, the Qur'an's emphasis on forgiveness suggests that Muslims should sometimes respond to evil with mercy, not retaliation. While many European countries urge an ethic of rehabilitation in their criminal justice systems, many jurisdictions in the United States stand firmly in favour of capital punishment for serious crimes. Even a federal jury in Massachusetts, a liberal bastion, recently doled out the death penalty to the sole surviving perpetrator of the Boston marathon bombing. And while the United Kingdom abandoned the death penalty in 1964 - the year of the last executions - nearly 1/2 of the British public favours a reintroduction of it (though that figure has been dropping steadily).

We will not make progress in the public debate about the death penalty unless we realise that it is only one element in a much bigger controversy: about the point of punishment itself. As The Conversation invites us to rethink the death penalty over the next several weeks, we must not conduct this discussion in a vacuum. Before you ask yourself whether we should have the death penalty, consider: why hand out any punishments at all? Considering the 3 main families in the philosophy of punishment can help us organise our conversation.

Retribution

"Bad guys deserve to suffer." This is a blunt slogan, but it captures the essence of a deeply familiar notion: people who have committed culpable wrongs deserve their lives to go worse as a result. Why do they deserve it? Perhaps because it's not fair for the lives of wrongdoers to go well when the lives of the innocent have gone poorly - punishment levels the playing field. Whatever the reason, "retributivists" - those who believe in retribution - argue that the punishment of criminals is intrinsically valuable; it is valuable in and of itself, rather than valuable because of its good consequences (for example, preventing future crime).

Even if punishing murderers and thieves had no effect on reducing the overall crime rate, retributivists tend to think it's still the right thing to do. Retributivists also think that the severity of punishment should match the severity of the crime. So, just as it is wrong to over-punish someone (executing someone for stealing a pair of shoes), it can be wrong to under-punish someone (giving him a community service order for murder).

If you are a retributivist, you might support the death penalty because you think that certain or all murderers (and perhaps other criminals) deserve to suffer death for their crimes. Depending on how you think about death, however, you might oppose the death penalty on the grounds that it is disproportionately harsh - perhaps you think that no matter what someone has done, she does not deserve to die for it.

On the other hand you might oppose the death penalty on the grounds that it is disproportionately light. Many people who opposed the recent death sentence for the Boston bomber did so on the grounds that life in a maximum-security prison would be a worse punishment - and so more fitting - than death. Deterrence

"Criminals should be punished so that they and others will be less likely to commit crime in the future, making everybody safer." Many people criticise retributivism on the grounds that it is nothing but a pointless quest for barbaric revenge.

Inflicting suffering on human beings, if it is to be morally justified, must instead have a forward-looking purpose: protecting the innocent from harm. If this sounds sensible to you, you probably believe the point of punishment is not retribution, but rather deterrence.

The idea here is familiar enough: people face temptations to break just laws; the demands of morality and the demands of rational self-interest sometimes seem to diverge. Threats of punishment realign those demands by making it irrational for self-interested individuals to break the law.

If you are a defender of deterrence, you must answer 2 questions about capital punishment before determining where you stand. The 1st is empirical: a question about real-world facts. Does the threat of the death penalty actually deter people from committing heinous crimes to a greater extent than the threat of life imprisonment?

The 2nd question is moral. Even if the death penalty deterred crime more successfully than life imprisonment, that doesn't necessarily mean it would be justified. After all, imagine if we threatened execution for all crimes, including minor traffic violations, theft, and tax fraud.

Doing so would surely slash the crime rate, yet most people would judge it to be wrong. Deterrence theorists tend to defend some upper limit on the harshness of punishment - and it may be that death simply goes beyond what the government is ever permitted to threaten.

Reform

"Punishment communicates to criminals that what they have done is wrong, and gives them an opportunity to apologise and reform." There are many different variants of this view: educative, communicative, rehabilitative - and there are important differences between them. But the basic idea is that punishment should make the wrongdoer understand what he or she has done wrong and inspire her to repent and reform.

Whatever version of this view one supports, its implication for the death penalty is reasonably clear. What is the point of a criminal reforming herself as she prepares for the execution chamber?

To be sure, many people try to mix and match different elements of these three broad views, though such mixed theories tend to be unhelpfully ad hoc and can offer conflicting guidance. Far better, to my mind, to plant one's flag clearly and answer the question: which view should have priority in our thinking about punishment?

Then, and only then, can we proceed to think about the justice (or lack thereof) of governments who kill their citizens.

(source: Jeffrey Howard,Lecturer in Political Philosophy at University of Essex ---- theconversation.com)






PAKISTAN:

Convicted: Death penalty awarded to constable's killer


An anti-terrorism court on Friday sentenced a man convicted of killing a constable to death on 2 counts.

Prosecution said Javaid Iqbal and his accomplices Shahid, Umar Hayat and Zafar Iqbal had shot dead a police constable, Muneer Ahmad, during a robbery on September 9, 2013. They said the constable had tried to stop them from robbing a house.

After examining the evidence and hearing witnesses, the judge sentenced Iqbal to death under Sections 302-B of Pakistan Penal Code (PPC) and Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA).

He was ordered to pay Rs500,000 compensation to the heirs the deceased and fined Rs500,000.

His accomplices were acquitted due to lack of substantial evidence.

(source: The Express Tribune)



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