After 8-year moratorium: Jordan hangs 11 men, angers rights groups

Interior minister says decision taken after major debate

AMMAN: Human rights groups took Jordan to task on Sunday as the country ended an eight-year moratorium on the death penalty by hanging 11 men convicted of murder.

The men were executed at dawn in a prison some 70 kilometres from the capital, interior ministry spokesman Ziyad Zoobi was quoted as saying by the official Petra news agency.

Authorities said the men were all Jordanians convicted of murder, with no links to politics or extremism, in 2005 and 2006.

A source in the prison system said the men were mostly in their 40s.

“Some of the prisoners asked to have their final words passed on their families, others asked only to smoke a cigarette,” the source said.

Jordan’s last previous executions were in June 2006, and 122 people have since been sentenced to death.

Interior Minister Hussein Majali had suggested recently that the moratorium might end, saying there was a “major debate” in Jordan on the death penalty and that the public believes that the rise in crime has been the result of the non-application of capital punishment.

Experts said the government was responding to a rise in crime.

“The authorities have been confronted in recent years with a wave of violence, criminality and murders and want to meet the challenge by opting for deterrence and the renewed application of the death penalty,” said Oraib Rantawi, head of Amman’s al Quds Centre for Political Studies.

Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said: “Reviving this inherently cruel form of punishment is another way Jordan is backsliding on human rights.”

The head of Jordan’s Adallah (Justice) rights group, Assem Rababa, said the authorities would be better off tackling the root causes of crime.

London’s ambassador to Amman, Peter Millett, said Britain believes use of the death penalty “undermines human dignity, that there is no conclusive evidence that it has any value as a deterrent, and that any miscarriage of justice is irreversible and irreparable”.

A number of countries in the Middle East continue to impose the death penalty for serious crimes, including Jordan’s neighbour Saudi Arabia.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 22^nd, 2014.