By Brian Lanciault

Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia

NEW DELHI, India– An Indian judge will announce Friday whether four men should hang after fatally raping a young woman on a bus last December. The case presents a major test for India’s paradoxical death penalty.

 

Indian judges hand down an average of 130 death sentences per year; they have executed only three people in 17 years. Despite this seeming reluctance to carry out the sentences,India voted last year against a U.N. draft resolution which called for a global moratorium on executions.

In November, India ended what many human rights groups had perceived as a de facto moratorium on capital punishment after executing Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, a militant convicted for the 2008 attack on Mumbai. Three months later, however, India hanged Mohammad Afzal Guru  for a 2001 militant attack on parliament.

“In the past year, India has made a full-scale retreat from its previous principled rejection of the death penalty,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director of Human Rights Watch.

She called for the complete abolition of the death penalty.

Prosecutors want the “harshest punishment” to be given to bus cleaner Akshay Kumar Singh, gym instructor Vinay Sharma, fruit-seller Pawan Gupta, and unemployed Mukesh Singh for the rape and murder of the woman. The hope is to send a signal to society that such attacks would not be tolerated.

Comments on social media suggest that popular opinion favors executing the men, yet a survey by CNN-IBN-The Hindu newspaper in July showed Indians were divided on capital punishment.

The four men were found guilty this week of luring the 23-year-old trainee physiotherapist onto a bus on December 16, raping and torturing her with a metal bar and then throwing her naked and bleeding into the street. She died two weeks later. Defense counsel A.P. Singh urged Judge Yogesh Khanna to ignore demands for the death penalty, which characterized as  “primitive and cold-blooded.

If the men are sentenced to death, a potentially multi-year appeals process lies ahead. The case will go the High Court and then the Supreme Court. If the courts confirm the sentences, the final decision will lie with the president, who has the power to grant clemency.

The death penalty should be imposed only in the “rarest of rare” cases, according to a Supreme Court ruling from the early 1980s. However opponents say the reality is quite different.

Indian courts sentenced 1,455 prisoners to death between 2001 and 2011, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. During the same period, sentences for 4,321 prisoners were commuted to life imprisonment.

There are 477 people on death row. Many have been there for years. Human rights groups are alarmed by the policy tendencies of President Pranab Mukherjee, who was sworn into office in July 2012. He has rejected 11 appeals for clemency, confirming the death penalty for 17 people.

Top politicians, including interior minister Sushilkumar Shinde, have said the death penalty is guaranteed in the case. Such comments could add pressure on the court to make a populist ruling to satisfy the public’s outrage.

For more information, please see:

Los Angeles Times — Indian police praised for handling of bus rape; other cases languish — 12 September 2013

Wall Street Journal — Rape Case: Sentencing Arguments — 11 September 2013

BBC — India Delhi gang rape four ‘deserve death penalty’ — 11 September 2013

Reuters — Delhi gang rape trial puts focus on death penalty paradox — 13 September 2013

By Brian Lanciault

Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia

ASIA– Nearly 24% of men surveyed in a U.N. report looking at violence against women in parts of Asia have admitted to committing at least one rape. Some ten thousand men from six countries took part in the survey.

Researchers interviewed more than 10,000 men at nine sites in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia,Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka in a first of its kind, multi-country survey on the prevalence of rape. Of those who admitted rape, just under half said they had done so more than once.

The prevalence of rape varied between countries.

In Papua New Guinea, more than six out of 10 men surveyed admitted forcing a woman to have sex. It was least common in areas of Bangladesh, where it was just under one in 10 and Sri Lanka where it was just over one in 10. In Cambodia, China and Indonesia it ranged from one in five to almost half of all men surveyed.

The men in the survey were questioned by trained male interviewers, and were left alone to record the answers to the most sensitive questions. The word “rape” was not used. Men were asked indirect questions such as, “Have you ever forced a woman who was not your wife or girlfriend at the time to have sex?” The results averaged around 11% of the men surveyed. When the question was altered to account for forcible intercourse with a wife or girlfriend, the average rose to 24%.

Nearly three quarters of those who committed rape said they did so for reasons of “sexual entitlement”. Report author Dr Emma Fulu said: “They believed they had the right to have sex with the woman regardless of consent.”

“The second most common motivation reported was to rape as a form of entertainment, so for fun or because they were bored,” Fulu reported. Some indicated using rape as a form of punishment or because they were angry. According to Fulu, “the least common motivation was alcohol.”

Men who had suffered violence as children, especially childhood sexual abuse were more likely to have committed rape.

“These data justifiably create global outrage, accentuated by horrific recent high-profile cases, including the brutal gang rape of a student in New Delhi,” said Dr. Michele Decker from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

More than half of non-partner rape perpetrators first did so as adolescents, which affirms that young people are a crucial target population for prevention of rape.

“The challenge now is to turn evidence into action, to create a safer future for the next generation of women and girls,” said Dr. Decker.

For more information, please see:

Hindustan Times — Asia-Pacific study points to a seething crisis of rape — 10 September 2013

The Hindu — ‘One in four men across Asia admit to having committed rape’ — 10 September 2013

BBC — Almost a quarter of men ‘admit to rape in parts of Asia’ — 9 September 2013

Bloomberg — One in Four Men Surveyed in Asian Study Say They Raped — 10 September 2013

 

By Brian Lanciault

Impunity Watch Reporter, Asia

NEW DELHI, India — Taliban militants in Afghanistan shot and killed an Indian author, Sushmita Banerjee, whose memoir about marrying an Afghan and living under the Islamist militia was made into a Bollywood movie. The killing  was the latest in a string of attacks on prominent women in Afghanistan, adding to growing fears that women’s rights in the country will recede even more after foreign military  forces  withdraw in 2014.

The militants arrived before dawn at Banjerjee’s residence in eastern Paktika province, which lies in Afghanistan’s east region, where the Taliban are particularly influential. According to provincial police chief Gen. Dawlat Khan Zadran, her husband, Jaanbaz Khan, answered the door and was immediately bound and blindfolded.  The militants then dragged Banerjee outside, and took her to a nearby road where they shot her at least 15 times, Zadran said.

Banerjee, who was in her 40s, was buried Thursday morning. She lived in Daygan Sorqala village, and was well-known as a medical worker in the area, with special training in gynecology. Originally from Kolkata, India, Banerjee wrote “A Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife,” which later became the basis for the 2003 film “Escape from Taliban.” The book described how she met Jaanbaz in India and agreed to marry him despite her parents’ disapproval of the fact that he was Muslim while she was Hindu. According to an online synopsis of the book, Banerjee moved to Afghanistan as Jaanbaz’s second wife, only to find that life under the Taliban’s increasing hold over the country would be unbearable. The Taliban militia, which rose to prominence in 1994 and officially ruled from 1996-2001, placed severe restrictions on women, forcing them to wear all-encompassing burqas and banning employment and education opportunities.

In an interview with India’s Rediff news, Banerjee described trying to flee Afghanistan multiple times to get away from the Taliban, and how she was ordered executed as a result of her attempts. She made it safely back to Kolkata in  1995.

“I still remember the day I stepped on Indian soil for the first time after I had left,” she said. “It was raining outside. People were scurrying for shelter. But I didn’t run. I just stood there and let the rain wash off my pain. I felt if I could bear so much in Afghanistan, I can surely bear my motherland’s rain. I don’t know how long I stood there, but I won’t forget that day.”

Her book was published in 1997, nine years after her marriage.

Zafar Khan, the father of Jaanbaz’s first wife, said Banerjee was beloved in the area, and was known locally by the name Sahib Kamal. He told Indian reporters that many residents were upset that an unarmed woman had been targeted.

“She was a very kind woman. She was very educated — she knew the Internet,” he told them. “Myself, I am very sad. Believe me, I haven’t been able to eat.”

Militants have targeted prominent women several times in recent months in Afghanistan. Last month, officials confirmed that Fariba Ahmadi Kakar, a lawmaker who represents Kandahar province in parliament, was kidnapped and was being held hostage, to be exchanged for four insurgents detained by the government.

In August, insurgents ambushed the convoy of a female Afghan senator, seriously wounding her in the attack and killing her 8-year-old daughter. Senator Rouh Gul Khirzad’s husband, son and another daughter were also wounded in the attack.

For more information, please see:

India Times– Indian author Sushmita Banerjee executed in Afghanistan by Taliban — 6 September 2013

ABC News– Afghan militants shoot dead Indian woman Shushmita Banerjee, who wrote about escape from Taliban — 5 September 2013

Indian Express– Indian author who wrote on her escape from Taliban killed in Afghanistan — 5 September 2013

CBS News– Police: Afghan militants drag female author out of her home, shoot her dead –5 September 2013