Where death rules

The Middle East and North Africa are strongholds of capital punishment.

In the United States, antideath penalty activists often refer to the ‘death belt’, those Southern states that have carried out the majority of the country’s executions in the last 40 years. In fact, there also exists a ‘global death belt’, which runs roughly along the 30th parallel north, from the United States to Japan, passing through Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, among other nations. Actually, apart from a few exceptions, the region experts call MENA (Middle East and North Africa) is a world stronghold of the death penalty.

Just to be clear, capital punishment does not automatically equal Islam, as proved by the fact that the increasingly Islamic Turkey, for instance, abolished the death penalty in 2004. But the statistics from countries that still use capital punishment speak volumes: in 2013, the country with the second highest number of executions after China was Iran, which “held around 700 executions if one tallies both the official instances and those reported by human rights NGOs”, according to Riccardo Noury, spokesman for Amnesty International Italia. “And the figures suggest that 2014 could be even worse.”

In third place is Iraq, “where there has been a surge in the use of capital punishment.

Sixty people were executed by November in 2014 alone,” continues Noury. “Then comes Saudi Arabia, where there have been roughly 2,000 executions in the last decade.”

The year 2013 saw a 15% increase in executions compared to the previous year. The main countries responsible for this rise are the same three: Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The situation in North Africa is very different seeing as there are quite a few abolitionist countries, though not on paper. “With the exception of Libya, the Maghreb countries have all made significant strides on the road to abolition,” stresses Noury.

“Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia still inflict death sentences, but no executions have been carried out for some time now. In the case of Marocco, for the past 20 years.”

Besides Libya, the other North African exception is Egypt, where at least on paper the death penalty seems to have come back in favour. On just one day last March, an Egyptian court condemned more than 500 members of the Muslim Brotherhood movement to death. That said, none of the sentences have been applied so far, and some have already been commuted to life imprisonment instead.

But observers are still worried. “A common factor in all these countries is that death sentences are issued on the basis of unfair procedures,” notes Noury. “Which means there’s a risk that the sentence is applied without any guarantee of a fair trial.”

In Iran and Saudi Arabia, it is common for people to be condemned to death for crimes they committed when they were minors. And there is also a problem with the kinds of crimes that carry the death penalty. International laws do not forbid capital punishment, but they do state that it “must be limited to the most serious crimes, and certainly not adultery, as is the case in Saudi Arabia,” says Noury. “Nor drug-related offences, which account for 80% of executions in Iran.”

Moreover, Iran also applies the death penalty for the crime of moharebeh, or “waging war against God,” a definition that can include a huge range of behaviour, such as homosexuality.

Indeed, the main difference between de facto abolitionist Muslim countries and some bastions of the death penalty seems to be the influence of Islamic law (sharia) on the criminal code.

“Sharia dominates criminal law in just a few countries, namely Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates,” explains Deborah Scolart, a researcher of Islamic Law at the University of Tor Vergata in Rome.

“How sharia criminal laws are applied can vary, even greatly.

Talking about it as a uniform system risks oversimplifying the issue.”

On the other hand, it has not always been the application of sharia in the criminal code that has made the difference. “The judicial systems of all Muslim countries (except those of the Arabian Peninsula) were shaped by former European powers,” explains Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, an expert on human rights in Islam and professor of law at the Emory University School of Law in Atlanta.

So the application of capital punishment in the MENA region derives from European procedures, not sharia. This was true in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq from the 1930s to the 1950s. Later on, the Arab legal systems did not follow the developments of their European counterparts, including the abolition of the death penalty.”

What’s more, adds Scolart, even in these countries “Islamic law is applied in civil law, for example for family matters or inheritance.” However, as Canadian jurist and leading expert on the subject William Schabas explains in his article “Islam and the Death Penalty”: “All Islamic countries have demonstrated some degree of flexibility in the interpretation of Islamic law. Yet, they stubbornly refuse to acknowledge that the same approach may be undertaken with respect to the death penalty. It appears that religion is little more than a pretext to justify a resort to harsh penalties that is driven by backward and repressive attitudes in the area of criminal law.”

But some light is managing to dispel the shadows. For example, there have been no executions in Lebanon since 2004. This is also the country that published the first ever Arabic translation of Cesare Beccaria’s masterpiece of judicial enlightenment, On Crimes and Punishments.