Don’t die hard. Don’t die young.

An ideal solution for the regime to increase the number of the population would be: Not to sacrifice more lives. Amnesty International has received reports of more than 700 executions so far this year.

Having a look at the numbers of juvenile offenders, it shows that 75 executions took place between 2005 and 2015. This year itself, at least three juvenile offenders have faced the death penalty. More than 160 are believed to be currently on death row in prisons across the country.

Fatemeh Salbehi was one of the recent cases. The 23-year-old woman was hanged on 13 October for a crime she allegedly committed when she was 17. She had been sentenced to death in May 2010 for the murder of her 30-year-old husband. She had been forced to marry Hamed Sadeghi at the age of 16.

A few days earlier, Samad Zahabi had been hanged for shooting a fellow shepherd during a row over who should graze their sheep. He committed this, when he was 17. Samad had been sentenced to death by the Provincial Criminal Court of Kermanshah Province in March 2013. This happened, even though he had said both during the investigations and at the trial that the shooting was unintentional and in self-defence, and resulted from a fight that he was drawn in against his will.

Mentioning juvenile offenders, Amnesty has recently been informed that Saman Naseem was returned to Oroumieh Central Prison. He had been held there before his enforced disappearance. He will be retried by a criminal court in Oroumieh, but the date of his trial has not been decided yet.

These facts and figures are very alarming and shout for urgent changes. Of note, Iran is scheduled to be reviewed by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) in January 2016.

Acknowledged executions in Iran and its neighbours in 2014

(Datasource: https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/death-penalty/)

How should Cameroon fight Boko Haram?

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There is nothing new about the Islamic Republic ranking second for number of executions , after China. But the fact that the official number almost reached 300 (to be precise: 289) in 2014 is harsh. It is also obvious that this number and the statistics shown in previous years are certainly below reality, since there are no publicly available data on capital punishment carried out in the country. Reliable sources informed Amnesty International that the figure might be even bigger than 740. According to some ethical principles, all, but only guilty people deserve to be punished, and of course, in proportion to the severity of their crime . And what does the international law say about the death penalty? It calls on states to guarantee that “Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life .” The law also provides that “In countries which have not abolished the death ...

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As the number of military personnel deployed to fight Boko Haram in the Far North Region of Cameroon has increased, the number of people detained without trial on suspicion of supporting the armed group has gone up, as well. Families and communities torn apart Since 2014, Cameroon’s security forces have arrested hundreds of people without charge during security operations. One man from the village of Double told us how security forces raided the village in search of suspected Boko Haram fighters: “Early in the morning, we heard gunshots and thought it was Boko Haram. We were scared and fled to the bush; then people called us to say it wasn’t Boko Haram, but the security forces, so we came back thinking we were safe. However, to our great surprise, those forces made us suffer even more than Boko Haram.” During this operation carried out in Double and in the neighbouring community, Magdeme, nine people were killed and more than 200 boys and men arbitrar...

Crumbs of human rights

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