Girls as young as 9 are sentenced to death according to an Amnesty International report
Shaqayeq, 15, has been in prison for almost a year on the charge of armed robbery from a chain store in Tehran. Her death sentence has been issued and she must reach 18 so the
verdict can be carried out. Her grandmother came to visit her after a
year. (Photo Sadegh Souri see more photographs Here)
By Amnesty International
Scores of youths in Iran are languishing on death row for crimes committed under the age of 18, said Amnesty International in a new report published today. The report debunks recent attempts by Iran’s authorities to whitewash their continuing violations of children’s rights and deflect criticism of their appalling record as one of the world’s last executioners of juvenile offenders.
Growing Up on Death Row: The Death Penalty and Juvenile Offenders in Iran reveals that Iran has continued to consign juvenile offenders to the gallows, while trumpeting as major advances, piecemeal reforms that fail to abolish the death penalty against juvenile offenders.
“This report sheds light on Iran’s shameful disregard for the rights of children. Iran is one of the few countries that continues to execute juvenile offenders in blatant violation of the absolute legal prohibition on the use of the death penalty against people under the age of 18 years at the time of the crime,” said Said Boumedouha, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Program.
“Despite some juvenile justice reforms, Iran continues to lag behind the rest of the world, maintaining laws that permit girls as young as nine and boys as young as 15 to be sentenced to death.”
In recent years the Iranian authorities have celebrated changes to the country’s 2013 Islamic Penal Code that allow judges to replace the death penalty with an alternative punishment based on a discretionary assessment of juvenile offenders’ mental growth and maturity at the time of the crime. However, these measures are far from a cause for celebration. In fact, they lay bare Iran’s ongoing failure to respect a pledge that it undertook over two decades ago, when it ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), to abolish the use of death penalty against juvenile offenders completely.
Growing Up On Death Row: The Death Penalty and Juvenile Offenders in Iran
Freeze frame from footage of a US drone strike in Pakistan.
By Jack Serle
As the number of US drone strikes in Pakistan hits 400, research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism finds that fewer than 4% of the people killed have been identified by available records as named members of al Qaeda. This calls in to question US Secretary of State John Kerry’s claim last year that only “confirmed terrorist targets at the highest level” were fired at.
The Bureau’s Naming the Dead project has gathered the names and, where possible, the details of people killed by CIA drones in Pakistan since June 2004. On October 11 an attack brought the total number of drone strikes in Pakistan up to 400.
Footage of US Drone Strikes in Pakistan
The names of the dead have been collected over a year of research in and outside Pakistan, using a multitude of sources. These include both Pakistani government records leaked to the Bureau, and hundreds of open source reports in English, Pashtun and Urdu.
Naming the Dead has also drawn on field investigations conducted by the Bureau’s researchers in Pakistan and other organizations, including Amnesty International, Reprieve and the Centre for Civilians in Conflict.
Only 704 of the 2,379 dead have been identified, and only 295 of these were reported to be members of some kind of armed group. Few corroborating details were available for those who were just described as militants. More than a third of them were not designated a rank, and almost 30% are not even linked to a specific group. Only 84 are identified as members of al Qaeda – less than 4% of the total number of people killed.
These findings “demonstrate the continuing complete lack of transparency surrounding US drone operations,” said Mustafa Qadri, Pakistan researcher for Amnesty International.
Cynical cold blooded murder for political advantage
Norman Finkelstein describes how Israel instigates conflict whenever there is a new
peace initiative. (Screen capture from DemocracyNow! video)
"A unity government was formed between the PA (Palestinian Authority) and Hamas. Netanyahu (prime minister of Israel) was enraged at this unity government. It called on the U.S., it called on the EU to break relations with the Palestinian Authority. Surprisingly the United States said, 'No. We're going to give this unity government time, we'll see whether it works or not.' Then the EU came in and said it will also give them time: 'Let's see what happens.' At this point Netanyahu virtually went berserk. And he was detemined to break up the unity government.
"When there was the abduction of the three Israeli teenagers he found his pretext. There isn't a scratch of evidence, not a jot of evidence that Hamas had anything to do with the kidnappings and the killings. Nobody even knows what the motive was at this point. Even if you look at the July 3rd report of Human Rights Watch, they said nobody knows who was behind the abductions. Even the U.S. State Department [at a July 7th news conference] said, 'We don't have hard evidence about who was responsible.' But that had nothing to do with it. It was just a pretext. The pretext was to go into the West Bank, attack Hamas, arrest 700 members of Hamas, blow up two homes, carry on these rampages and ransackings, and try to evoke a reaction from Hamas. This is what Israel always does.
"Anybody who knows the history - It's what the Israeli mainstream political scientist Avner Yaniv said, 'It's these Palestinian peace offensives. Whenever the Palestinians seem like they are trying to reach a settlement of the conflict (which the unity government was) at that point Israel does everything it can to provoke a violent reaction...' and Israel has its pretext."—Norman Finkelstein
By Haaretz Amnesty International called on Israel on Wednesday to lift restrictions on Mordecai Vanunu, a decade after he was released from an 18-year prison sentence for disclosing information to journalists about Israel's nuclear program.
"The authorities' continued punishment of Mordechai Vanunu appears to be purely vindictive," said Avner Gidron, senior policy adviser at Amnesty International. "The continued restrictions on his liberty have placed a severe strain on his mental and physical health and should immediately be lifted."
Vanunu, a former technician at Israel's nuclear reactor, is banned from leaving Israel and participating in Internet chats, and must seek permission to communicate with journalists or any foreign nationals. Amnesty International is calling on Israel to allow Vanunu to leave the country and exercise his rights to freedom of movement, expression and association. Israel says the restrictions are necessary to prevent Vanunu from divulging further secrets, but Vanunu says he has no further information to reveal.
By Daniel Wickham
The top ten recipients of US foreign assistance this year all practice torture and are responsible for major human rights abuses, according to the findings of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other leading human rights organisations.
This may be in violation of existing US law, which requires that little or no aid be provided to a country which “engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, including torture”.
A report released by the Congressional Research Service lists the following countries as the largest beneficiaries of US government-provided aid planned for 2014:
1. Israel – $3.1bn
2. Afghanistan – $2.2bn
3. Egypt – $1.6bn
4. Pakistan – $1.2bn
5. Nigeria – $693m
6. Jordan – $671m
7. Iraq – $573m
8. Kenya – $564m
9. Tanzania – $553m
10.Uganda -$456m
All ten have been accused of torturing people in the last year, and at least half of them are reported to be doing so on a massive scale.
by Cora Currier ProPublica, Nov. 5, 2013, 2:23 p.m. November 6: This story has been updated to reflect new developments.
Nearly six months ago, President Obama promised more transparency and tighter policies around targeted killings. In a speech, Obama vowed that the U.S. would only use force against a "continuing and imminent threat to the American people." It would fire only when there was "near-certainty" civilians would not be killed or injured, and when capture was not feasible. The number of drone strikes has dropped this year, but they've continued to make headlines. On Friday, a U.S. drone killed the head of the Pakistani Taliban. A few days earlier came the first drone strike in Somaliain nearly two years. How much has changed since the president's speech?
Drone ground station (USAF).
We don't know the U.S. count of civilian deaths
The administration says that it has a count of civilian deaths, and that there is a "wide gap" between U.S. and independent figures. But the administration won't release its own figures. Outsideestimatesof total civilian deaths since 2002 range from just over 200 to more than 1,000. The Pakistani government has given three different numbers: 400, 147, and 67. McClatchy and the Washington Post obtained intelligence documents showing that for long stretches of time, the CIA estimated few or no civilian deaths. The documents also confirmed the use of signature strikes, in which the U.S. targets people without knowing their identity. The CIA categorized many of those killed as simply "other militants" or "foreign fighters." The Post wrote that the agency sometimes designated "militants" with what seemed like circumstantial or vague evidence, such as "men who were probably' involved in cross-border attacks" in Afghanistan.
RQ-1 Predator aircraft, Tallil Air Base, (AB), Iraq.
The administration reportedly curtailed signature strikes this year, though the new guidelines don't necessarily preclude them. A White House factsheet released around Obama's speech said that "it is not the case that all military-aged males in the vicinity of a target are deemed to be combatants." It did not say that people must be identified. (In any case, the U.S. has not officially acknowledged the policy of signature strikes.)
We don't know exactly who can be targeted
The list of groups that the military considers "associated forces" of Al Qaeda is classified. The administration has declared that it targets members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and "elements" of Al Shabaab, but there are still questions about how the U.S. determines that an individual belonging to those groups is in fact a "continuing and imminent threat." (After the terror alarm that led to the closing of U.S. embassies this summer, officials told the New York Times they had "expanded the scope of people [they] could go after" in Yemen.) This ties into the debate over civilian casualties: The government would seem to consider some people legitimate targets that others don't.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch conducted in-depth studies of particular strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, respectively. They include eyewitness reports of civilian deaths. (Most of the deaths investigated happened before the Obama administration's new policies were announced, although the administration has not said when those guidelines went into effect.) The reports also raised questions of the legality of specific strikes, questioning whether the deaths were all unavoidable casualties of legitimate attacks.It does not appear that the U.S. plans to expand strikes against Al Qaeda to other countries — officials have reportedly told Iraq, for example, it won't send drones there. But the U.S. has established a surveillance drone base in Niger, and fed information from drones to French forces fighting in Mali.
"Drones Kill People" - Protesters at President Obama's inauguration 2012 (Photo: Debra Sweet).
We don't know if the U.S. compensates civilian casualties
CIA director John Brennan suggested during his confirmation hearing that the U.S. made condolence payments to harmed families. But there is little evidence of it happening. U.S. Central Command told ProPublica that it had 33 pages related to condolence payments — but wouldn't release any of them to us.
We don't always know which strikes are American
While unnamed officials sometimes confirm that strikes came from U.S. drones, other attacks may be from Pakistani, Yemeni, or even Saudi planes. (It's also worth noting that the U.S. has also used cruise missiles and Special Forces raids. But the bulk of U.S. counterterrorism actions outside Afghanistan in recent years appear to rely on drones.)
We don't know the precise legal rationale behind the strikes
Some members of Congress have seen the legal memos behind targeted killing of U.S. citizens. But lawmakers were not granted access to all memos on the program. Legislation pending in the Senate would require the administration to give the Intelligence Committees a list of such legal opinions.
Other congressmen have introduced billswith more reporting requirements for targeted killings. (Proposals for a "drone court" for oversight have not gotten very far.)
"Reaper" Drone - Even deadlier than the Predator Drone.
It's far from clear that any of that additional oversight would lead to public disclosure. The government and the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times are still locked in court battles over requests for drone documents. While a judge has ruled the CIA can no longer assert the "fiction" that it can't reveal if it has any interest in drones, the agency hasn't been compelled to release any information yet. The government has also so far fought off disclosure of legal memos underpinning targeted killings.
And here are some things we've learned through leaks and independent reporting: How the U.S. tracks targets: Documents provided by Edward Snowden to the Washington Post detailed the NSA's "extensive involvement." Lawyers in a terrorism-related case also uncovered reports that government surveillance of their client may have led to a drone strike in Somalia. The Atlanticpublished a detailed account of Yemen using a child to plant a tracking chip on a man who was killed in a U.S. strike.
The CIA's role: The administration had reportedly planned to scale back the CIA's role in targeted killing, moving control of much of the drone program to the military. But the CIA reportedly still handles strikes in Pakistan and has a role in Yemen as well. Officials told Foreign Policy yesterday that the transition won't happen anytime soon.
The history of the programs: Revelations continue to change our understanding of the contours of the drone war, but two books published this year offer comprehensive accounts — The Way of the Knife, by Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, and Dirty Wars, by Jeremy Scahill.
