Help Stop Yemen from Executing a Juvenile Offender

Like the United States, Yemen has treaty obligations to follow when it comes to children and the criminal justice system. And like the U.S. -- and, to be fair, a whole lot of other countries -- it doesn't much seem to care.

Signatories to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – like the U.S. and Yemen – are not supposed to (emphasis on supposed) to execute people who committed crimes as juveniles. Indeed, Article 6 of the treaty states as clear as day that the death penalty “shall not be imposed for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age.”

But as Amnesty International reports, the Yemeni government is poised to execute Muhammed Taher Thabet Samoum, using a firing squad, for a murder he allegedly committed as a minor in 1999. Amnesty says the government recently barred Samoum from receiving visitors, which is generally a sign a prisoner is about to be put to death.

"We urge President Ali Abdullah Saleh to show clemency in this case and prevent the state killing of Muhammed Taher Thabet Samoum," says Malcolm Smart, Amnesty's director for the Middle East and North Africa. "The death penalty is the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, and it must never be applied to juvenile offenders."

And it's not just a bunch of liberal do-gooders like us saying that. In addition to the one, wee little treaty already mentioned, Yemen's move to execute a man who allegedly committed a crime as a minor is in direct contravention of the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 37 of which says that a child "should not be sentenced to death or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.” (Fun fact: only the U.S., which sentences more kids to die behind bars than anywhere else in the world, and Somalia – which doesn't have a functioning central government – have not signed the treaty.)

“Executing individuals for crimes they are alleged to have committed when they were less than 18 years of age is not only inhumane,” says Smart, “but also contravenes both Yemeni law Yemen’s obligations under international human rights treaties.”

International pressure, however, could save Samoum's life. And don't laugh. In the case of Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashianti, the Iranian woman who was set to be stoned to death for allegedly murdering her husband, international outrage – and the Iranian government's fear of embarrassment and universal condemnation (public officials the world over are generally pretty thin skinned, rhetoric aside) – has led to her sentence being suspended, albeit the threat of execution still lingers.

Placing pressure on the Yemeni government – from President Ali Abdullah Saleh to Minister of Human Rights Huda Ali Abdullatef Alban – can have a similar impact, especially since the country's leaders have spent the last few years trying to convince Western nations they're one of the good Middle Eastern dictatorships; you know, one of the corrupt, authoritarian regimes that should be provided bombs, rather than being bombed – er, “liberated,” to use the euphemistic parlance of our time.

Join Amnesty International and other human rights activists in urging the Yemeni government to stop executing juvenile offenders and to immediately grant clemency to Muhammed Taher Thabet Samoum.

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Photo Credit: Alexandre Baron