UN ‘appalled’ by public executions in Afghanistan
- Three public executions have been carried out at sports stadiums in the past week
- Witnesses said shooting executions were carried out by relatives of murder victims
The United Nations condemned recent public executions in Afghanistan, urging the Taliban authorities to cease the use of capital punishment.
Afghanistan’s Taliban government publicly executed three convicted murderers in the past week on death warrants signed by Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.
All three men were shot multiple times in front of large crowds that included the families of their victims.
“We are appalled by the public executions of three people at sports stadiums in Afghanistan in the past week,” said Jeremy Laurence, spokesman for the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner in a statement on Wednesday.
“Public executions are a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” the statement added.
“Such executions are also arbitrary in nature and contrary to the right to life protected under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Afghanistan is a State party.”
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The United States, the only Western democracy that still practises capital punishment, also condemned the public executions.
“It’s another sign of the brutality that the Afghan government shows to its own people,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said on Tuesday.
The Taliban held a public execution on Monday of a man convicted of murder in northern Afghanistan as thousands watched at a sports stadium.
The execution took place in heavy snowfall in the city of Shibirghan, the capital of northern Jawzjan province, where the brother of the murdered man shot the convict five times with a rifle, according to a witness.
The executed man, identified as Nazar Mohammad from Bilcheragh district in Faryab province, was convicted of killing Khal Mohammad, also from Faryab, it said. The killing took place in Jawzjan.
Last Thursday in the southeastern Ghazni province, the Taliban executed two men convicted of stabbing their victims to death. Relatives of the victims fired guns at the two men, also at a sports stadium, as thousands of people watched.
According to an Agence France-Presse tally, there have now been five death penalties carried out since the Taliban returned.
During the Taliban’s first rule from 1996 to 2001, public executions were common.
One of the most infamous images from that era depicted the 1999 execution of a woman wearing an all-covering burka in a Kabul stadium. She had been accused of killing her husband.
Since their return to power in August 2021, a handful of executions have been conducted in accordance with their government’s austere vision of Islam.
Corporal punishment – mainly flogging – has been common, however, and employed for crimes including theft, adultery and alcohol consumption.
The UN statement urged the authorities “to establish an immediate moratorium on any further executions, and to act swiftly to prohibit use of the death penalty in its entirety.
“Corporal punishment must also cease,” it added.
Amnesty International last week called the Taliban government’s death penalty policy “a gross affront to human dignity”.
China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United States were respectively ranked the world’s most prolific practitioners of the death penalty in 2022, according to Amnesty.
Agence France-Presse and Associated Press
