Harsh justice
Written by Writer on Monday, October 20th, 2008
POLICY PEEK
By Ernesto F. Herrera
The Manila Times
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Harsh justice
The number of executions in Saudi Arabia has sharply increased and a lot of those put to death are foreigners, the human rights group Amnesty International said in a statement reported by the Associated Press (AP).
“The number of executions—which are usually carried out by beheading—rose to 158 last year, giving Saudi Arabia one of the highest rates of execution in the world, Amnesty said. The group recorded 39 executions the year before,” read the AP report.
As we all know, Filipino worker Venancio Ladion was beheaded on Tuesday. The AP said that with his execution and that of another Saudi national, there have now been 72 people beheaded this year in Saudi.
According to Amnesty International, almost half of the 1,800 executions they recorded over the last 28 years were of foreigners. Most of them were migrant workers from Asia and Africa. Often the defendants are unable to follow court proceedings in Arabic and have no legal assistance.
Amnesty said many of the Saudi trials failed to meet international standards for fairness. Particularly troubling, the group told AP, is that Saudi law does not disqualify confessions obtained by torture or other illegal means.
Malcom Smart, Amnesty’s Middle East director said that they had hoped the human rights initiatives introduced by the Saudi authorities “would bring an end to–or at least a significant reduction—in the use of the death penalty.”
“Yet, in fact, we have witnessed a sharp rise in executions of prisoners sentenced in largely secret and unfair trials, making the need for a moratorium more urgent than ever,” he said in the AP story.
The Department of Foreign Affairs said the government did everything possible to save Ladion, who also went by the name Jenifer Bedoya. The Filipino was executed for fatally stabbing and strangling a Saudi national guard.
The government said it appealed Ladion’s case to the local emirs, the governor of Jeddah and the minister of interior. When those didn’t work, President Macapagal-Arroyo wrote to the Saudi King asking for clemency.
Still, the relatives of Ladion blame the government for not having provided proper representation and legal assistance when he needed it most.
Foreign Affairs Undersecretary Esteban Conejos said though that, in the end, Ladion was executed because the family of his victim refused to forgive him. He explained that under the Sharia law of Saudi, murder carries both a private as well as a public liability, and that even the Saudi King cannot grant clemency (forgiving the public aspect of the case), if the murder victim’s family would insist on the right to punishment, as did the relatives of Ladion’s victim.
We don’t know why Ladion did what he did in a land when death usually gets death, no ifs and buts. Like most OFWs, his family paint Ladion to be a man who was just there to make a living and send some money back home; a poor man who wanted to get his family out of poverty.
Just the other day, it was reported that another Filipino worker, this time in Taiwan, was convicted of murder and robbery and sentenced to death. The Manila Economic and Cultural Office said it is exhausting all legal remedies to save Nemencia Armia from execution.
Conejos told the media that there are still 40 Filipinos facing the death penalty today in countries like Malaysia, China, Brunei, Kuwait, the US, and of course, Saudi Arabia. There used to be 64, he noted, but the government was able to commute the sentences of 24 of them to life imprisonment.
Bigger budget
It must be quite expensive for the DFA to be hiring interpreters and lawyers in other countries to represent our workers who have been accused of various crimes, but this they must do. It is not only the government’s obligation but we owe it to these fellow Filipinos who are practically subsidizing the Philippine economy, especially during these hard times, by the billions of dollars they send in remittances, not to mention the billions they pay the government in fees that are supposedly meant to help take care of them while they work overseas.
There are Filipino workers in 202 countries around the world and the DFA as well as the Department of Labor and Employment (Dole) are supposed to help take care of them. This is why there should be a lot more in the national budget allocated to the DFA and DOLE. The Blas F. Ople Policy Center and Training Institute noted this is clearly not the case though.
Susan Ople, president of the policy center, said, for instance, that if you take out personnel services from Dole’s budget, then it would only be left with P1 billion for programs, services, and projects, for both Filipino workers here and abroad.
One billion pesos only. And yet it is estimated OFWs will remit close to $16 billion this year, not counting the dollars they will send through unofficial channels, and the billions they will pay the government for various fees.
Luging lugi.
ernestboyherrera@yahoo.com
