Commute sentence

BY ESDRAS CATARI PICHARDO, CARACAS, VENEZUELA

Courtesy: Arab News

(November 13, Riyadh, Sri Lanka Guardian) I'm writing to you to express my concern about Rizana Nafeek who was arrested in May 2005 on charges of murdering an infant in her care. She was 17 years old at the time. On June 16, 2007, she was sentenced to death by a court in Dawadmi, a town west of the capital Riyadh. The sentence was subsequently upheld by the Court of Cassation and sent for ratification by the Supreme Judicial Council. However, the Council sent it back to the lower court for further clarification.

The case then went back and forth between the courts until on or around Oct. 25 2010, when the Supreme Court in Riyadh upheld the death sentence. The case was then sent to the king for ratification of the death sentence; if the king does ratify the death sentence, Rizana Nafeek will be at imminent risk of execution by beheading.

Rizana Nafeek had no access to lawyers either during her pre-trial interrogation or at her first trial. She initially "confessed" to the murder during interrogation but has since retracted her confession, which she says she was forced to make under duress following a physical assault. The man who translated Rizana's statement was not an officially recognized translator and it appears that he may not have been able adequately to translate between Tamil and Arabic. He has since left Saudi Arabia.

Rizana Nafeek arrived in Saudi Arabia in May 2005 to work as a housemaid. The passport she used to enter Saudi Arabia gives her date of birth as February 1982 but according to her birth certificate she was born six years later, in February 1988. This would make her 17 years old at the time of the murder for which she has been convicted.

According to Amnesty International's information, she was not allowed to present her birth certificate or other evidence of her age to the court, which relied instead on her passport and so considered her to be 23 years old at the time of the crime. Saudi Arabia is a state party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which prohibits the execution of offenders for crimes committed when they were under 18 years old.

In view of the above mentioned information, I urge you to prevent the execution of Rizana Nafeek who is believed to have been under 18 at the time of the crime for which she has been convicted;

I ask you to commute this death sentence, particularly given Saudi Arabia's obligations as a state party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child and having regard to the uncertainty over Rizana Nafeek's age;

I remind the authorities that they should act in accordance with international law, particularly Article 37 of the Convention of the Rights of the Child, and end the use of the death penalty against juvenile offenders.