The Death Penalty

In what seemed to be an accelerating trend, many countries imposed the death penalty in 1993 in circumstances of, at best, serious due process deficiencies.

· In Algeria, twenty-six death sentences were carried out, most of them after trials in special courts with severe due process restrictions, including the use of confessions secured through torture. Over 350 were sentenced to death, mostly in absentia, and thus with a theoretical right to contest the sentences if apprehended.

· In Egypt, thirty-nine civilians were sentenced to death and seventeen were hanged by military courts that lacked the independence of Egypt's civilian courts, and from which there was no right of appeal.

· In Saudi Arabia, executions imposed after summary trials proceeded at a rate of more than double that of 1992, with sixty-three executed, most by beheading, in the first seven months of 1993. Most defendants were not represented by lawyers at trial or assisted in preparing their defense.

· In Kuwait, seven Iraqis and ten Palestinians were sentenced to death in 1993, and another Iraqi was executed in May after having been sentenced to death in 1992. Their trials featured confessions obtained through torture, and legal counsel before trial was not permitted.

· In Nigeria, thirteen death sentences were imposed (though later commuted) by special tribunals with no right of appeal.

· Peru approved a new constitution which increases the number of crimes carrying the death penalty despite a bar to such expansion in the American Convention on Human Rights. The extensive use of "faceless courts" only compounds theseriousness of this step backward.

· In addition to continuing large-scale judicial executions in Iran, there were at least four assassinations of Iranians linked to exile opposition parties.

· In the United States, where thirty-six of fifty states permit the death penalty, the Supreme Court in 1993 continued to restrict appeals available to death-row defendants, including a ruling that new evidence of innocence is not enough to grant a hearing, let alone a new trial. Thirty-five people were executed in the first eleven months of 1993, the most in thirty years. Several of those killed had the mental capacity of children, a transgression of at least the spirit of the international prohibition on the execution of minors.