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| FILE - In this Monday, April 21, 2008 file photo, a Syrian boy holds up a photo of a beheading, at a rally in downtown Damascus, Syria to protest Saudi Arabia?'s beheading of two Syrians after being charged with drug trafficking. Saudi Arabia carried out at least 157 executions in 2015, with beheadings reaching their highest level in the country in two decades, according to several advocacy groups that monitor the death penalty worldwide. |
DUBAI, United
Arab Emirates (AP) -- Saudi Arabia carried out at least 157
executions in 2015, with beheadings reaching their highest level in the
kingdom in two decades, according to several advocacy groups that
monitor the death penalty worldwide.
Coinciding
with the rise in executions is the number of people executed for
non-lethal offenses that judges have wide discretion to rule on,
particularly for drug-related crimes.
Rights
group Amnesty International said in November that at least 63 people had
been executed since the start of the year for drug-related offenses.
That figure made for at least 40 percent of the total number of
executions in 2015, compared to less than four percent for drug-related
executions in 2010. Amnesty said
Saudi Arabia had exceeded its highest
level of executions since 1995, when 192 executions were recorded.
But
while most crimes, such as premeditated murder, may carry fixed
punishments under Saudi Arabia's interpretation of the Islamic law, or
Shariah, drug-related offenses are considered "ta'zir", meaning neither
the crime nor the punishment is defined in Islam.
Discretionary judgments for "ta'zir" crimes have led to arbitrary rulings with contentious outcomes.
In
a lengthy report issued in August, Amnesty International noted the case
of Lafi al-Shammari, a Saudi national with no previous criminal record
who was executed in mid-2015 for drug trafficking. The person arrested
with him and charged with the same offenses received a 10-year prison
sentence, despite having prior arrests related to drug trafficking.
Human
Rights Watch found that of the first 100 prisoners executed in 2015, 56
had been based on judicial discretion and not for crimes for which
Islamic law mandates a specific death penalty punishment.
Shariah scholars hold vastly different views on the application of the death penalty, particularly for cases of "ta'zir."
Delphine
Lourtau, research director at Cornell Law School's Death Penalty
Worldwide, adds that there are Shariah law experts "whose views are that
procedural safeguards surrounding capital punishment are so
stringent
that they make death penalty almost virtually impossible."
She
says in Saudi Arabia, defendants are not provided defense lawyers and
in numerous cases of South Asians arrested for drug trafficking, they
are not provided translators in court hearings. She said there are also
questions "over the degree of influence the executive has on trial
outcomes" when it comes to cases where Shiite activists are sentenced to
death.
Emory Law professor and Shariah
scholar Abdullahi An-Naim said because there is an "inherent
infallibility in court systems," no judicial system can claim to enforce
an immutable, infallible form of Shariah.
"There
is a gap between what Islam is and what Islam is as understood by human
beings," he said. "Shariah was never intended to be coercively applied
by the state."
Similar to how the U.S.
Constitution is seen as a living document with interpretations that have
expanded over the years, more so is the Quran, which serves as a
cornerstone of Shariah, he said. The other half to Shariah is the
judgments carried out by the Prophet Muhammad. Virtually anything else
becomes an interpretation of Shariah and not Shariah itself, An-Naim
said.
Of Islam's four major schools of
thought, the underpinning of Saudi Arabia's legal system is based on the
most conservative Hanbali branch and an ideology widely known as
Wahhabism.
A 2005 royal decree issued in Saudi
Arabia to combat narcotics further codified the right of judges to
issue execution sentences "as a discretionary penalty" against any
person found guilty of smuggling, receiving, or manufacturing drugs.
HRW's Middle East researcher Adam Coolge says Saudi Arabia executed 158 people in total in 2015 compared to 90 the year before.
Catherine
Higham, a caseworker for Reprieve, which works against the death
penalty worldwide, says her organization documented 157 executions in
the kingdom. Saudi Arabia does not release annual tallies, though it
does announce individual executions in state media throughout the year.
Saudi
law allows for execution in cases of murder, drug offenses and rape.
Though seldom carried out, the death penalty also applies to adultery,
apostasy and witchcraft.
In defense of how
Saudi Arabia applies Shariah, the kingdom's representative to the U.N.
Human Rights Council, Bandar al-Aiban, said in an address in Geneva in
March that capital punishment applies "only (to) those who commit
heinous crimes that threaten security."
Because
Saudi Arabia carries out most executions through beheading and
sometimes in public, it has been compared to the extremist Islamic State
group, which also carries out public beheadings and claims to be
implementing Shariah.
Saudi Arabia strongly
rejects this. In December, Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told
reporters in Paris "it's easy to say Wahhabism equals Daesh equals
terrorism, which is not true." Daesh is the Arabic acronym for the IS
group.
Unlike the extrajudicial beheadings IS
carries out against hostages and others, the kingdom says its judiciary
process requires at least 13 judges at three levels of court to rule in
favor of a death sentence before it is carried out. Saudi officials also
argue executions are aimed at combating crime.
Even
with the kingdom's record level of executions in 2015, Amnesty
International says China, where information about the death penalty is a
"state secret," is believed to execute more individuals that the rest
of the world's figures combined.
Reprieve says
that in Iran, more than 1,000 people were executed in 2015. Another
organization called Iran Human Rights, which is based in Oslo, Norway,
and closely follows executions, said at least 648 people had been
executed in the first six months of 2015 in the Islamic Republic, with
more than two-thirds for drug offenses.
Reprieve
says Pakistan has executed at least 315 people in 2015, after the
country lifted a moratorium on executions early last year following a
December 2014 Taliban attack on a school that killed 150 people, most of
them children. Only a fraction of those executed since then have been
people convicted of a terrorist attack.
