Opponents Of “Death Penalty” Accuse Islamists Of Misunderstanding Holy Koran!

At a seminar initiated by Amnesty International in Algiers, on the eve of the International Day Against the Death Penalty, human rights activists called for the continuation of the struggle to abolish executions by virtue of Algerian laws, stressing that the hurdle to their endeavor is political more than religious.

In this respect, Algerian lawyer Miloud Brahimi called for a comprehensive amnesty for the benefit of all those sentenced to death and who are now detained Algerian prisons.

Mr. Miloud Brahimi, on Monday, expressed the traditional demand for the abolition of the death penalty, calling on the President of the Republic to grant amnesty for about 500 detainees sentenced to capital punishment, considering that such a nagging problem needs a political and legal solution.

“Why these people didn’t come out  notably the Islamists who did not speak  out against those who committed horrible crimes against humanity during the country’s the black decade,” Mr. Brahimi said in his response to those demanding the implementation of the death penalty and to those who took to the streets to demand retribution against the murderers of children. 

Innocent raped women and the illegitimacy of innocence in the nineties,” he said,” Now they talk about religion… why this double standard policy? “, he added.

The head of Amnesty International in Algeria, Hassina Oussedik, said that around 500 people had been sentenced to death in Algeria until 2017. 

She considered that the Government, which had ratified the moratorium on the death penalty and had not abolished it, “lost a precious opportunity” to scrap the most severe crime against humanity. 

Public opinion is not ready to be dominated by the religious side, calling on the state and civil society and human rights activists to steadily pursue the campaign against the death penalty.

Former Public Prosecutor, Mr. Benhenni Abdelkader, said that the death penalty should have been abolished since the amendment of the Code of Criminal Procedure in 2009, reviewing the status of those sentenced to death.

 “The Algerian state has been courageous in freezing the capital punishment, but it does not have the will to repeal its laws”, he underlined.

The latter further argued that the Islamists who are demanding the enforcement of the death penalty in Algeria didn’t read the Holy Koran well enough so as to thoroughly understand the relevant verses.

For his part, Mr. Mokhtar Ben Said, President of the Algerian League for Human Rights, claimed that there is a contradiction between the Koranic verses themselves, related he said, “to the story of life”, while considering that there are various interpretations and incorrect translations of the Koranic text, and this prompted some people to adhere to the death penalty on the basis of a wrong understanding, as he put it.