Kuwait has ignored the voices of rejection and has executed seven sentenced to death this Wednesday. The method used has been that of hanging, in all cases. For humanitarian organizations this is a regrettable setback, after almost six years of an unofficial moratorium on the death penalty in Kuwait, the country that has the closest thing to a representative system in all of Arabia.
Among those executed are two women and five men, of various nationalities: four Kuwaitis, a Syrian, a Pakistani and an Ethiopian. Although all of them had been convicted of murder, in some cases the sentence had been aggravated by crimes - according to Kuwaiti law - such as adultery.
The EU has condemned the hangings and has summoned the Kuwaiti ambassador. To make matters worse, the executions have taken place during the visit to the emirate of Margaritis Schinas, vice president of the European Commission. Nor has Amnesty International's call yesterday for the commutation of sentences been of any use, as soon as it was announced that the scaffold was raised.
The new emir -for two years- Nawaf al Ahmad al Jaber al Sabah, had already given his approval to the executions -the first of his reign- which have been defended by his government as in accordance with the Koran.
Turkey is the only country (partially) in the Middle East that has completely abolished the death penalty, twenty years ago, when this was one of the measures demanded by Brussels for its admission candidacy. Israel, for its part, has abolished it for ordinary crimes. While Lebanon observes an amnesty since 2004.
The latter is a path encouraged by the European institutions, which contemplate the informal amnesty as a step prior to formal abolition. Some thirty countries are in this phase, but reality has shown that it is not a path of no return. India decided to abandon it a decade ago, after eight years without executions. While Kuwait has done it this Wednesday.
The latest series of executions in the oil-rich emirate dates back to January 25, 2017, when seven inmates - including a member of the Al Sabah family - were hanged.
His region continues to be one of the world's most killed with legal coverage, with Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia in the lead. The latter kingdom has doubled the number of executions compared to the previous year - in March alone it beheaded 81 in a one-day holocaust - and has also just executed two Pakistani prisoners for heroin trafficking, a crime that had been commuted for years. grief. Further east, in Afghanistan, the supreme guide, Emir Haibatulah Ajundzada, has just urged judges to apply sharia rigorously.
The United States is one of the non-abolitionist countries where the number of executions - by lethal injection or electric chair - has nevertheless declined in recent years. But in others, the humanitarian admonitions of abolitionist Europe are falling on deaf ears, at a time when European diplomacy itself calls for resolving a conflict like the one in Ukraine "on the battlefield."
