Mission & Justice

Annabel Stafford; 28/8/08

Australian doctors will dob in Chinese hospitals that sell the organs of executed prisoners to Australian patients as part of a global push to stamp out the illegal trade in human organs. At a meeting of transplant doctors in Sydney this month, the Australian president of the International Transplantation Society promised that his members would alert Chinese authorities when a non-Chinese person travelled to China to buy an organ and would ask the authorities to explain.Society president Jeremy Chapman stressed that the society would not be dobbing in patients but hospitals, which under recent changes to Chinese law are banned from buying or selling organs.

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Indonesian spy could face death over activist’s murder
21-22/8/08
A former top Indonesian spy could face the death penalty after he was charged Thursday with orchestrating the poisoning murder of a celebrated rights activist who had exposed military abuses. Muchdi Purwopranjono, 59, an ex-deputy chief of the State Intelligence Agency (BIN), was charged with plotting Munir’s murder by arsenic poisoning as he flew from Jakarta to Amsterdam in 2004. Prosecutors said the killing was an act of “revenge” after Munir uncovered the kidnappings of 13 activists by special forces under ex-general Muchdi’s command in the late 1990s. Muchdi later used his new posting as a BIN deputy to order Garuda Indonesia pilot Pollycarpus Priyanto to poison Munir as he travelled on the national carrier, they said. The case is the first time a high-ranking figure in the military establishment has faced justice over the murder, which rights activists have long suspected was the work of the secret intelligence services.

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21/8/08

Texas is scheduled today to execute a mentally ill man for conspiracy to murder in a case that death penalty opponents say illustrates why the practice is deeply flawed. Jeffery Lee Wood, 35, “has never taken a human life by his own hands,” and “was outside the building in a car at the time of the murder,” his lawyers said in a statement. Wood’s partner in crime, Daniel Reneau, was executed in 2002 for killing a store manager during a robbery. “At Reneau’s trial, the prosecution had argued that Reneau was the person chiefly responsible for the crime and that Wood’s role was secondary,” the Death Penalty Information Centre said. “Wood was involved in the robbery in this case because of his longstanding mental illness that allowed him to be easily manipulated by the principal actor, Daniel Reneau,” his lawyers argued. Texas is the top executioner in the United States, with 413 executions over the last 30 years, out of a national total of 1,119 for that period.

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Mariam Al Hakeem; 13/8/08

Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia Shaikh Abdul Aziz Bin Abdullah Al Shaikh has affirmed that removal of respirators from brain-dead people and babies born with disability is not permissible since their hearts beat naturally. Addressing a meeting of senior doctors in Taif city, he also said that it is prohibited to force prisoners sentenced to death to donate their organs and treat as brain-dead persons. “It is right to execute them, but there is no right to cut a part of their organs,” he explained. “It is wrong to take some parts of the body of a person sentenced to death and then carry out the death penalty on him. This is not permissible,” he added.

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9/8/08

Imposing the death penalty for those disclosing state secrets and documents to enemy countries as part of a proposed law was criticised by leading human rights group here on day. The Bahrain Human Rights Watch Society (BHRWS) highlighted in a statement its concern for the bill tabled by five members to the upper house for including the death sentence in new legislation despite worldwide rejection of such punishment. “Lawmakers should keep up with international trends while drafting their legislation as many countries are fighting to scrap the death penalty in their outdated laws, while here we are reimposing it,” a BHRWS member and member of the upper house, Faisal Fulad said in the statement.

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8/8/08

The US state of Texas has executed a Honduran man who had said his rights were violated after his arrest for murder in the US. Heliberto Chi, 29, was pronounced dead at 23:25 GMT after receiving a lethal injection at a death chamber in Huntsville, the Texas department of criminal justice said in a statement on Thursday. The execution took place after the US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal.

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6/8/08

Indonesia will execute a total of 39 Indonesian and foreign drug traffickers held on death row by the end of 2009, officials said on Wednesday, as the country faces a growing illegal drugs problem. Three Australians sentenced to death for drug trafficking are not among the 39 because they have not yet exhausted all avenues of appeal. “The president has rejected clemency for 39 people, so the next stage for them is execution,” said Indradi Thanos, head of the national police drugs unit.

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6/8/08; http://www.jordantimes.com/?news=9820

An Iranian journalist convicted and sentenced to death on terrorism charges has been executed, the country’s judiciary said Tuesday. Yaghoob Mirnehad was executed Monday in the city of Zahedan after being sentenced to death earlier this year, said judiciary spokesman Ali Reza Jamshidi. Iran accused Mirnehad of being involved in the armed Jundallah group, which operates along the Iranian-Pakistani border. Authorities said he set up a group to “cooperate” with Jundallah. Mirnehad was a reporter for a Tehran-based daily newspaper, Mardomsalari. He also ran a charity that focused on childhood education. He was arrested in May 2007 in Zahedan, the provincial capital of the Sistan-Baluchistan province about 1,600 kilometres southeast of Tehran. Jamshidi said Mirnehad’s conviction was not related to his job, but he gave no other details. State-run Press TV reported on its website that another alleged member of Jundallah has been executed along with Mirnehad.

Frank Brennan; 30/8/08

Last week, Helen Clark, the New Zealand Prime Minister, was asked about the pending execution of the three Bali bombers in Indonesia. She replied: “The New Zealand Government does not support the death penalty under any circumstances. Clearly these men are guilty of heinous crimes and those crimes, in any jurisdiction, would justify them (getting) very serious penalties available under law but the New Zealand Government will not and does not support the death penalty.” Kevin Rudd and his ministers need to say the same thing on our behalf. As well as the Bali bombers, there are at present three young Australians on death row in Indonesia. One is Scott Rush, a drug mule. Other Australians in the drug trade will face a similar fate. For their sake, we need to put a consistent position on the death penalty now.

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30/7/08

The European Union on Tuesday denounced Iran’s execution of 29 convicts at the weekend as “an affront to human dignity” and said it was deeply concerned about Tehran’s increasing use of the death penalty. Iran’s state media said the drug smugglers and other criminals were executed in Tehran’s Evin prison at dawn on Sunday, following an expanded crackdown on crime. The French EU Presidency said the 27-nation European Union, which opposes the death penalty, condemned the executions in the strongest terms. “It considers that the Iranian regime’s action of staging these executions and making them the focus of media attention is an affront to human dignity,” it said in a statement. It said the EU was deeply concerned by Iran’s increasing use of the death penalty in recent months and urged it to end the practice.

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