Executions down in 2010, rights groups says
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down in 2010, rights groups says
(Reuters) – At least 527 people were executed around the world last year, down from 714 in 2009, although China is believed to have put to death thousands more, human rights group Amnesty International said on Monday.
It said Beijing was thought to have executed far more people than the rest of the world combined. Amnesty’s tally does not include figures for China, which describes them as state secrets, the rights group said.
At least 23 countries carried out judicial executions in 2010, four more than the previous year, Amnesty said in its annual report on the death penalty, which it wants abolished.
China has scrapped the death penalty for 13 non-violent crimes including smuggling historic relics and tax fraud-related offenses, but capital punishment will still apply to 55 offences, Chinese news reports said last month.
“A number of countries continue to pass death sentences for drug-related offences, economic crimes, sexual relations between consenting adults and blasphemy, violating international human rights law forbidding the use of the death penalty except for the most serious crimes,” Amnesty International Secretary General Salil Shetty said in a statement.
Of the 527 executions recorded in 2010, at least 252 were carried out in Iran, at least 60 in North Korea, at least 53 in Yemen, 46 in the United States, at least 27 in Saudi Arabia, at least 18 in Libya and at least 17 in Syria, Amnesty said, noting that only a few countries published official figures.
China says executions of 3 Filipino drug convicts will proceed, not linked to territorial spat
March 17, 2011 Filed under Ahen
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Three Filipino drugs mules on death row in China will eventually be executed. AFP Photo
MANILA, Philippines — China will proceed with the executions of three Filipino drug convicts delayed last month and the decision was unrelated to a recent territorial spat, the Chinese ambassador said Thursday.
President Benigno Aquino last month sent his vice-president to make a last-minute plea to Beijing and won an indefinite stay of execution of the two Filipino women and one man. China’s rare gesture raised local hopes that the three, who have denied they were drug traffickers, could be saved from lethal injection.
The Philippines has abolished the death penalty and the plight of Filipinos on death row abroad is an emotional and political issue.
Chinese Ambassador Liu Jianchao said in a news conference that a commutation of the death sentences “has been ruled out,” adding that the verdict of China’s Supreme People’s Court was final and could be enforced “sooner or later.”
Aquino has already written to Chinese President Hu Jintao appealing for clemency. He told reporters that the issue will test China’s promise of building closer bilateral ties.
China, however, said the matter involved criminal cases that were independent from the Asian countries’ robust bilateral relations.
“I don’t want our wonderful relations to be kidnapped by these drug criminals,” Liu said, adding that the three Filipinos “at the moment are still alive.”
Predicaments faced by Filipino workers overseas — including employer abuse, lack of legal protection and a myriad of other problems — is a sensitive issue in the Philippines, which has some 10 per cent of 94 million people toiling abroad to escape widespread poverty and unemployment at home.
Execution does not stop Chinese knife attacks
Police officers show teachers and school workers at a Beijing school how to defend themselves during an attack.
(CNN) — Early in the morning on March 23, Zheng Minsheng walked in front of an elementary school in Fujian province. Wielding a knife, he attacked the students who happened to be around, killing eight and wounding several others.
Authorities said Zheng, 42, carried out the attack because he was frustrated at “failures in his romantic life,” according to the official Xinhua News Agency. Whatever his real motive was, the senseless killing, reported widely by the Chinese media, shocked the nation. Zheng was tried, sentenced to death and executed on April 28.
If Chinese authorities thought Zheng’s execution would deter similar attacks, they were wrong. The day he was executed, a knife-wielding man attacked elementary school students in southern Guangdong province, wounding 16 students and a teacher. The attacker was later subdued by the police, and no one died.
The next day, a man in Jiangsu province barged into a kindergarten and stabbed 31 people, including 28 students, two teachers and one security guard. “It was too horrible to imagine,” one eyewitness told local reporters. “I saw blood everywhere.” Police apprehended the suspect, 47-year-old Xu Yuyuan.Then, on April 30, a man barged into a village school in Shandong province, carrying a hammer and a can of gasoline. Wang Yonglai, a local farmer, attacked preschool students with the hammer, causing head injuries. He then set himself on fire and died. According to a Xinhua report, the local farmer went berserk after the local police told him that the family house he had just built using 110,000 yuan (US$16,110) of family savings had to be torn down because it had been built on farmland, which is illegal in China.
Embassy rejects reports of Iranian drug smugglers’ execution
January 19, 2010 Filed under Commerce & consulates
By Zhao Hongyi
The Iranian Embassy rejected reports circulating the past couple of weeks that nationals convicted of drug smuggling in China have been executed.
“Since three years ago, a total of 46 Iranians have been charged with trading in illegal drugs in China. Most of these people were not drug smugglers but were in fact ordinary airline passengers who were unaware o the narcotics packed in their luggage,” Iran’s Mehr News Agency quoted an embassy official as saying.
The embassy released a statement last Friday saying that “no Iranian has been arrested in the past year for drug smggling, or executed for that matter.” It said “Tehran’s embassy in Beijing is determined to defend the rights and interests of all Iranians residing in China.
The statement said a number of Iranian detainees received death sentences two years ago, but that the verdicts were still on appeal at the appellate court in Beijing. When contacted for further comment, a consul said he had no knowledge of the issue.
The embassy’s press officer Mohammad Ali Ziaei declined to comment on the “sensitive issue,” but willingly discussed another charge against Iranian nationals: an attack Tuesday against the search engiBaidu. Media reported that the site was defaced by hackers who left a message saying, “This site has been hacked by the Iranian Cyber Army.
Ziaei said the Iranian government condemned the attack and said it went against Iran’s pro-China foreign policy. “Iran condemns these actions and hopes it won’t bring any negative impact on bilateral relations,” he said, adding that perpetrators could also be foreign hackers operating from Iran.
Baidu was attacked Tuesday morning and was inaccessible for the rest of the day. Netizens said the hackers tampered with the search engine’s Domain Name System (DNS), redirecting traffic to another site. Baidu’s gineers later confirmed that the attack came from hackers in Iran.
Netizens unite in support of heroin trafficker’s death
January 5, 2010 Filed under News
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Akmal Shaikh Photo provided by Wuhan Evening News
By Li Zhixin
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and other senior British politicians angrily condemned China for executing a British drug smuggler, saying they were “appalled and disappointed that our persistent requests for clemency have not been granted.”
But Chinese and British Web users seem united in their support of the execution.
Despite frantic appeals by the British Foreign Office, Akmal Shaikh, 53, was executed at 10.30 am on Tuesday morning in Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
Shaikh is believed to be the first citizen of the 17-year-old European Union to be executed in China in the last 58 years.
The government said it would resist any interference in its judicial affairs. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said the government was “strongly dissatisfied” with Britain’s stance and called on the UK to retreat from its stance to avoid damaging Sino-British ties.
Xiao Huanrong, dean of international relations at the Communication University of China, said the British government’s remarks showed a double standard for legal affairs in China.
The response from the public was also overwhelming. A survey on Huanqiu.com showed among 26,000 Chinese netiznes surveyed, 62 percent said the British Prime Minister was trampling on China’s judicial sovereignty and 38 percent said they did so out of ignorance and habit.
In another survey of 63,292 netizens on Sohu.com, 91 percent said laws require enforcement to mean anything.
“Its human nature to plead for a criminal who is from the same country or the same family, but judicial independence should be respected and any person who sets foot on Chinese soil must respect our laws,” said Li Tao, a postgraduate of Communication University of China.
Netizens pointed out the amount of heroin Shaikh carried was far greater than the minimum needed for a death sentence.
“In China, anyone who carries more than 50 grams of heroin faces execution. The amount Shaikh carried was more than 80 times that,” a netizen named Huan Huan said. “Why should Chinese law be lenient to hiDo you have any idea how many people his drugs would have reached?”
Many British netizens also expressed their support of the decision.
“If you break the law you face the consequences. We don’t want him serving his sennce in the UK and then getting out to perhaps committing [sic] similar offences in future”, said Rorywiltshire Swindon in a comment on the website of theDaily Mail, a popular British newspaper.
Another man, Kevin Sullivan, posted at Time Online, saying: “It’s a shame the UK doesn’t have the same courage to deal with people like that. Why is there always uproar in the UK press when one of its citizens caught smuggling drugs abroad? Drug smugglers are scum, they peddle death and misery without a care for the victims!”
“Were we to apply the Chinese, and, many other Far Eastern countries version of justice, we could possibly see a reduction in a problem that poses severe problems for the west. Then again, we may not, but the problem would not get any worse, and, drug smugglers would know exactly where they stand,” he said.
