World Day against the Death Penalty:2000 prisoners wait for the implementation of death penalties in Algeria

The Algerian League for Human Rights wrote a correspondence to the Algerian President and PM, on the World Day against the Death Penalty supervised by the United Nations on every 10th October.

The ALHR called upon the president Abdelaziz Bouteflika and PM Ahmed Ouyahia to intervene urgently to replace the death penalty in prison with twenty years, and stop issuing death sentences, especially because they are not implemented as everyone knows, noting that no death penalty was applied since 1993.

Same league demanded the closure of what it called “corridors of death in prison”, places in which prisoners with death sentences live total isolation, and the ratification on the second protocol of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights has become necessary, according to the Algerian Association of Human rights chaired by Boudjemaa Ghachir.

In its international meetings the ALHR counted 58 countries where death penalties are applied, while all European countries decided to cancel the verdict eternally, but in Algeria the sentence is still issued without implementation and the criminal court in the various council across the country issued at least sixty or seventy death penalties annually, and most of the provisions are issued on charges of kidnapping and murder, while some dictatorships use it for eliminating their opponents.

Currently, at the global level 20.000 defendants, sentenced to death will face real and true death sentence during this year, while in Algeria the number of death penalties since the nineties reached 2000 defendants, however; those provisions were not implemented, such as the case of Boumarafi, the man implicated in the assassination of the former Algerian President Mohamed Boudiaf, and who got death penalty, but he is still alive in prison after more than twenty years of the final sentence in Blida detention (west of Algiers).

In its correspondence to the president, the ALHR considered the death penalty a “violence which incites another not against the defendant but his family which become another victim”. ..The problem in Algeria is that the sentence is not implemented but the judges issued it despite Algeria ratified the abolition of death penalty in the recommendation under the N° 62-149, issued by the UN, and since that time, implementation was canceled but the provisions remain unapplied, and the desolate and awful corridor of death receives death penalties in all Algerian prisons, although having the right to see their families and love ones as normal.

Algeria did not implement the death penalty since the case of the terrorist attack which targeted the international airport Houari Boumediene, as the verdict was in the past for treason and terrorism, drugs, economic crime, murder with premeditation, but in was limited in the recent years only to murder as a crime and terrorism.