[The following report was issued by Human Rights Watch on 4 March 2013.] 

Look at Us With a Merciful Eye: Juvenile Offenders Awaiting Execution in Yemen

Summary 

I want the world to know that here they are executing [juvenile offenders]. No one cares or checks these juvenile cases.… If you don’t have anybody [to help you,] they just execute you, whether you are young or not.

— Qaid Youssef Omar Al-Khadamy, on death row in Sanaa Central Prison for a murder he committed when he says he was fifteen years old, 27 March 2012

On the afternoon of 3 December 2012, Hind Ali Abdu al-Barti was taken from her cell in Sanaa Central Prison and executed by a firing squad. Prison authorities only informed Hind’s family that morning of her imminent execution. Hind was sentenced to death for committing murder, and her sentence had been ratified by Yemen’s highest court and confirmed by then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Though her family produced a birth certificate showing that she was fifteen years old at the time of the alleged crime, and a forensic examination concluded she was no more than sixteen, courts disregarded this evidence. When the Yemeni government executed her after four years in prison, Hind was no more than twenty years old. 

International law prohibits, without exception, the execution of individuals for crimes committed before they turn 18. When courts cannot establish conclusively that a defendant was eighteen or older at the time of the alleged crime, international law indicates that they cannot impose a death sentence. Yemen has ratified both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which specifically prohibit capital punishment of persons under 18 at the time of the offense. Since 1994, Yemen’s penal code has also banned the execution of juvenile offenders and stipulates a maximum penalty of 10 years’ imprisonment for minors who commit capital offenses.

Yet since 2007, Yemen has executed fifteen young men and women who claimed to be under eighteen at the time of their offense. Prosecutors have demanded death sentences for dozens of additional juvenile offenders. In some cases, defendants lack the documentation to prove they were under age eighteen at the time of their alleged crime; in other cases, public prosecutors and judges simply disregard available evidence. At present, the Yemeni government does little to counter either problem.

Yemen has one of the lowest rates of birth registration in the world—between 2000 and 2010, the state registered only twenty-two percent of all births. Thus, most juvenile offenders lack official birth certificates to prove their age. Yemen’s judiciary lacks impartial and accurate mechanisms to determine the age of youths in criminal proceedings, increasing the risk that juveniles are sentenced to death. Prosecutors ordered forensic examinations in some of the cases reviewed for this report, but these examinations relied on error-prone and outdated methods. In some cases, both prosecutors and defense lawyers ordered age examinations that yielded different results, but courts relied on the prosecution’s examinations that estimated defendants were over eighteen.

As of January 2013, at least twenty-three young men and women await execution under death sentences in Yemeni prisons despite having produced evidence indicating they were under eighty at the time of the crimes for which they were convicted. Three of them, Mohammed Taher Sumoom, Walid Hussein Haikal, and Mohammad al-Tawil, could be executed at any moment. They have exhausted all forms of appeal, and Saleh, the former president, signed their execution decrees before he left office. The president’s signature is the final step before carrying out death penalty sentences. In addition to the twenty-three possible juvenile offenders on death row, Yemen’s public prosecution has called for the death penalty in pending cases of at least 186 other alleged juvenile offenders, according to both the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the Yemeni NGO Coalition on Child Rights Care (YNGOC), a local civil society group monitoring inhumane juvenile sentencing.

All of these alleged juvenile offenders under the death sentence were convicted of murder, a crime some of them admit and others challenge. Many of the stories surrounding these crimes reflect the lack of development common to adolescents, including following adults and older peers into fraught situations, and a quickness of action in the moment without appreciation of the consequences. But it is because of such reasons of lack of maturity and judgment that both international and Yemeni law require judges to consider the age of the defendant as a mitigating factor, and recognize that such individuals are not yet sufficiently responsible for their own actions to deserve the ultimate punishment.

Under Yemeni law, courts may only sentence juveniles convicted of murder to a maximum of 10 years in prison. However, Yemen’s current child protection law, called the Juvenile Welfare Law, only requires courts to refer children fifteen years of age and younger to the juvenile court system, leaving many juvenile offenders to defend their cases before adult criminal courts. 

Yemen’s judicial system also frequently fails to meet international fair trial standards, meaning that defendants, adults, and juveniles may be sentenced to death after forced confessions or based upon testimony given without having had access to legal counsel. Some juvenile offenders interviewed by Human Rights Watch said that police investigators tortured them to extract confessions and described in detail the methods of torture they had endured. Ibrahim al-Omaisy and Walid Haikal, death row prisoners interviewed for this report, described how police investigators forcibly extracted confessions, interrogating them while or after torturing them. Neither had access to legal counsel until these confessions had been recorded and their cases reached trial.

This report documents the stories of young men who have been sentenced to death in Yemen against the backdrop of international conventions and domestic law which prohibit the execution of individuals for crimes committed before they turn eighteen. In March 2012, Human Rights Watch interviewed five young men at Sanaa Central Prison who had been sentenced to death for crimes committed when they say they were younger than eighteen. Prison authorities granted us access to the prison, and permission to interview these individuals in a private room outside the presence of prison officials.

Human Rights Watch obtained an additional eighteen names of alleged juvenile offenders on death row from UNICEF and YNGOC. YNGOC conducts regular prison monitoring visits and aims to track all juvenile death penalty cases. We subsequently reviewed court rulings, forensic reports, and appeals filed in these cases.  

Based upon this research, Human Rights Watch concluded that Yemeni criminal courts sentenced juvenile offenders to death either by disregarding entirely proof of their age at the time of the alleged crime, or using forensic examinations of dubious evidentiary value to determine the defendants’ age.  

Human Rights Watch opposes capital punishment in all circumstances. Human rights principles and protections are founded upon respect for the inherent dignity of all human beings and the inviolability of the human person. These principles cannot be reconciled with the death penalty, a form of punishment that is unique in its cruelty and finality. 

Yemen’s transitional government has before it an opportunity to reverse one of the country’s most stark human rights violations through a few simple but urgent steps. First, the president should immediately reverse the execution orders of Mohammed Taher Sumoum, Walid Hussein Haikal, and Mohammad Abdu Qassim at-Tawil, juvenile offenders who have exhausted all forms of appeal and risk imminent execution, and refer their cases to courts so that their sentences may be reviewed. If a fair and impartial review of evidence concerning their age at the time of their crime determines they were under eighteen, they should be commuted under Yemen’s Penal Code, meaning that as all three have already served ten years or more of jail time, the maximum permissible sentence for juveniles convicted of murder, they should be released. Judicial authorities should immediately suspend all executions of individuals who claim to have been under eighteen at the time of their alleged crime, at least until the cases are reviewed by an independent committee and their ages are determined in a fair and impartial manner. To provide an impartial age determination process, the Ministry of Justice should establish an independent review committee including trained forensic medical professionals to develop standardized age determination procedures that follow international best practices in this area. Finally, authorities should work to guarantee fair trials and provide appropriate safeguards as required by both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, both treaties ratified by Yemen’s government. 

The Yemeni government should publish clear procedures outlining how authorities will handle future murder cases involving alleged juvenile defendants. The government should also raise awareness regarding the importance of birth registration through public information campaigns, and ensure that civil registration units equipped to register new births are available across the country and accessible to poor and rural communities. Finally, the government should declare a moratorium on the death penalty in all cases, consistent with the moratorium declared by the United Nations General Assembly in 2007, with a view to abolishing the death penalty at the earliest possible opportunity.

[Click here to download the full report.]