April 29, 2014 - The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Tuesday expressed concern over a new regulation in the Maldives on the application of the death penalty, which ends a 60-year moratorium in this country.
“The new regulation, which was adopted by the government on Sunday April 27, provides for the death penalty for the crime of intentional homicide, including for people under the age of 18. The age of criminal responsibility in the Maldives is 10 years old, but for 'hadd' offenses children are considered responsible from the age of 7. With the new regulations, a 7-year-old child can therefore be sentenced to death, ”OHCHR spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani explained at a press conference in Geneva.
The hadd or the hudud are penalties provided for in Islamic religious law, the Shari'a, for specific offenses. Under the new Maldivian regulations, sentenced children will be executed when they reach the age of 18.
Since 2012, the regime has re-Islamized despite democratic progress (some may even say thanks to democratic progress, judging that the call for violent jihad is a democratic right!). In the last two years, young girls are severely condemned (whipping) for sex outside marriage, even in case of rape! A petition (which gathered more than two million signatories) managed to save one of them.
This rigorous state Islam that forces all women to be veiled is very disconcerting, and everything has been organized in the country to deny tourists access to the islands where Maldivians live and thus avoid relations between residents and foreigners . As for justice, it is the translation of sharia law.
On 27 April 2014, the Government of Maldives passed a new regulation on the application of the death penalty, which ended a sixty-year moratorium.
The new regulation thus provides that the death penalty is applicable for the crime of intentional homicide, and that it is also applicable for persons under the age of 18.
Criminal liability is applicable in Maldives from the age of 10 years, but for Sharia offenses, children are considered responsible from 7 years: "With the new regulation, a child 7 years can be sentenced to death, "Ravina Shamdasani explained.
The new regulation provides that children sentenced to death will not be executed immediately but only when they reach the age of 18.
International treaties, including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by the Maldives, strictly prohibit the death penalty for persons under the age of 18 at the time of the crime.
The judicial evolution of the Maldives is therefore very serious.
Not only has the 60-year moratorium on the death penalty been dropped, while in 2010, under the chairmanship of Mohamed Nasheed, the only leader who sought to liberalize the country, the Maldives had committed to the Council of human rights to maintain this moratorium, but the death penalty is now extended and applicable until children from 7 years.
Condemning children to death is barbaric, but condemning to death is also barbaric. No society of men is empowered to suppress life because it escapes it.
Moreover, the United States, China, Iran and North Korea, are part of this increasingly small club, fortunately, which perpetuate this barbarity of the death penalty. In 1944, in a few weeks, South Carolina, a particularly racist state at the time, even tried in a botched trial, sentenced to death and executed a boy of 14 years, George Stinney, yet innocent of murder of two children of which he was accused.
It is likely that the incantations of UN officials will remain dead letters to the Maldivian government.
On the other hand, all the candidates for a heavenly holiday in one of the Maldives Islands would be particularly inspired not to go to the end of their project become indecent: how can we remain blind the toes in front of the reality of a country ready to kill its youngest inhabitants for crimes whose reality would be very uncertain.
When traveling to a country, even for holidays, the least human respect is to try to find out how those who live there live. In the Maldives, visibly, the end of liberalization has been confirmed this 27 April 2014.
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