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path: Home / Queries /Executions, Amnesty International
- In #14 "Take This Sabbath Day" Sam mentions to Charlie that "The United States is one of five countries that puts to death people under 18." Charlie names the others as: Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran. As Bob Harris writes, this leaves out Yemen. He directs us to Amnesty International's site which says:
- "International human rights treaties prohibit anyone under 18 years old at the time of the crime being sentenced to death. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the American Convention on Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child all have provisions to this effect. More than 110 countries whose laws still provide for the death penalty for at least some offences have laws specifically excluding the execution of child offenders or may be presumed to exclude such executions by being parties to one or another of the above treaties. A small number of countries, however, continue to execute child offenders.
Six countries since 1990 are known to have executed prisoners who were under 18 years old at the time of the crime - Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, USA and Yemen. The country which carried out the greatest number of known executions of child offenders was the USA (13 since 1990)."
- What is that poster on Toby's office wall?
- It says at the top "Amnesty International Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights". It used to be available at The Amnesty International Online Store --- we no longer see it on their site but someone who doesn't want their name posted sent us this Link to Colorado State University's large picture of it. The same person also gave us a link to another page that gives detailed information about the poster including that the artist is Woody Pirtle and that it came out in 1998 and its dimensions are 91 x 61 cm. See this information page with another large version of the poster.
- Could a Turkish court sentence a woman to be executed for adultery as is reported in "King Corn"?
- After this episode aired, we heard from three angry people and a fourth person posted on Television Without Pity's West Wing forum some evidence against this possibility:
- "celticann" posted a link: CNN reported in 2002: "Turkey abolishes death penalty"
- Cagla Howard also sent us a link to "Constitution of Turkey (article 38 as amended in October 2001) which says "The death penalty shall not be imposed excluding the cases in time of war, imminent threat of war and terrorist crimes."" and following suggestions she made, we also came up with the following:
- BBC (September 14, 2004) "The Turkish government and the opposition have indicated that controversial plans to criminalise adultery have been dropped.
"Adultery used to be illegal in Turkey until 1996, when the Constitutional Court struck the law down because it penalised women more than men."- The Washington Post (September 21, 2004) By Fareed Zakaria: "...even if the adultery law passes ...were Turkey to become an E.U. member, the adultery law would quickly be null and void, since the European courts would rule against it.... laws that reflect the deep concern in every Muslim country that as they modernize, they will become permissive and licentious. This concern is not uniquely Islamic. Every conservative movement and party in the Western world has worried deeply about this for the past 200 years."
- Aljazeera.net had a story on on September 13, 2004 which said of the proposed law, "A final draft of the adultery clause has not been published as the government says it is still under discussion, but AKP officials say it envisages jail sentences of up to two years.... only a husband or wife could initiate proceedings rather than third parties such as the state...."
- Tom Schantz, Turkey Peace Corps 1966-1968, wrote: "We will be mobilizing former Turkey Peace Corps volunteers to point out the dangers that an ignorant scriptwriter can create."
- And someone with a Boston University email address and identifying himself/herself as "a second year Phd student" wrote, "In Turkey nobody can be sanction to execuation because of a sexual relation. Rather there is no law on putting them even into the prison."
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