by Katy Dolan

In 2006, Ibrahim Fouad Mohsen al-Omaisy drove a microbus in Sana’a, the capital city of Yemen. He estimates he was 15 or 16 years old. On a routine drive, three men in the backseat of al-Omaisy’s bus began to argue about the purchase of a car. A shot was fired, and one of the men was killed. Two days later, al-Omaisy went to the police station to make a report on the crime. He was immediately taken into custody. Interrogators beat and electro-shocked him until he confessed to a crime that he did not commit. He was not visited by a lawyer until the day of his first trial, at which he was sentenced to ten years in prison and a fine equivalent to 25,600 U.S. dollars. The judge in this trial recognized that al-Omaisy was a juvenile and sentenced him according to the law, which stipulates that the maximum punishment for a juvenile offender is ten years in prison. However, in an appeal, the prosecution provided evidence that al-Omaisy was over the age of 18 at the time of the crime, and he was sentenced to death. Now, he waits on death row in the Sana’a Central Prison, desperately maintaining his innocence and dreading his execution day.

Yemen, the second largest country in the Arabian Peninsula, is plagued by a bloody history of rebellion and civil war, ranging from the dynastic ages to the twenty-first century. Yemen was thrown into the global spotlight in 2011 when it and other Middle Eastern countries began massive protests against their dictatorial governments. When human rights violations came to light, they were unsurprising given Yemen’s rampant corruption and high poverty levels. The most egregious transgressions are perpetrated on children, with child marriage and forced labor at the top of the list. However, another sinister story is not being told: the plight of juveniles like al-Omaisy, who are condemned to life in prison or execution for crimes they committed (or allegedly committed) when they are still only children.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. Article 37 of the Convention prohibits a life imprisonment capital punishment sentence when the accused was a minor at the time of the offense. Yemen signed this Convention, and subsequently enacted its own laws to prohibit cruel treatment of children. In 1994, Yemen prohibited the execution of persons under the age of 18. However, its law also states that individuals from 15 to 17 years of age, ought to be tried as adults. Those juveniles, then, are left in a legal gray area—eligible for a full trial with the possibility of the death penalty, yet protected from the death penalty by both national and international law.

Despite the international consensus on child capital punishment, 23 Yemini awaited death sentences in January of 2013 for crimes that they committed when they were under the age of 18. According to Human Rights Watch, the state prosecution had called for the death penalty in at least 186 pending cases at that time. It is estimated that Yemen executed about 15 prisoners between 2007 and 2013 where there were reasonable arguments that they were under 18 at the time of the offense.

There are two main reasons for this crisis: false confessions and improper age determinations. As soon as the youths are detained or arrested, their confessions are forced out by means of cruel interrogation tactics that can even include torture. Law enforcement officials beat suspects, suspend them from the ceiling, break their fingers, or threaten rape until there is an admission of guilt. Understandably, many arrestees choose to confess falsely rather than endure another session of brutality.

Such was the case of Walid Hussein Haikal. At age 15, he defended himself in a small scuffle with the local thug. One week later the thug was found dead, and Haikal was arrested. For two long months he endured beatings and torture because he did not confess to the murder. At long last, the suffering became too much for Haikal. “I felt so scared, I thought my heart would burst out of my body. So of course I told them I did it. I told them a lie.” The prosecution triumphantly pointed to Haikal’s confession as dispositive evidence during his subsequent trial.

By the time cases are brought to trial, the fate of the accused is sometimes already sealed due to the assumed validity of confessions, many of which are false and made under duress. Yet even upon a  conviction, these young defendants should be protected from harsh sentences by domestic and international law. But age can only give mercy if it can be proven. Herein lies the second major barrier to justice.

The chief reason behind Yemen’s issues with child life imprisonment or capital punishment sentences is the country’s lack of birth documentation. Approximately 80% of the country’s population does not officially register the birth of a child, and the registry rate is only an estimated 5% among the poorest fifth of the population. When defendants are called upon to prove their age at the time of the alleged crime, most cannot produce legitimate evidence that they were under 18. Aggressive prosecutors typically order a medical examination in such cases.  If a medical examiner is even able to evaluate the accused, they often only perform a wrist or arm x-ray. The British Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health has proven that method of age determination has been proven to carry a margin of error of up to two years in either direction. These procedures are further muddled by the fact that the bone density of citizens in countries like Yemen can be drastically influenced by poverty and malnutrition, so standardized age/density distributions should not be used.

Yet these determinations are most often accepted as proof of age in lieu of an official birth certificate. The defendant (and sometimes the defendant’s family) usually testify that they were under 18 at the time of the alleged offense. But judges will not accept the oral testimony in light of medical examinations ordered by the prosecution. Even though they may have been brought to court on a false confession and had a new age assigned to them, juveniles can easily sentenced to life in prison, or the death penalty.

In Yemen, life in prison is extremely grim. Many prisons hold as many as twice the number of inmates that they were designed to hold, and this overcrowding creates filthy and unsafe conditions. Sexual abuse runs rampant in Yemini correctional facilities, and many prisoners choose to take their own life. Inmates on death row, meanwhile, are engaged in a fatal waiting game. They try to rest in tiny bunks usually shared between two prisoners. Sometimes they attend school, although those sentenced to capital punishment usually have reduced privileges. But for juvenile offenders, adolescence has been almost entirely lost. Arrested in their teens and swiftly convicted, they linger in prison for years until they are no longer young. Two, four, or six years can pass before a retrial or the execution occurs.

During this time, the wrongfully convicted face uncertainty. Although their families or lawyers are often working tirelessly through the appeals process, the convicted can face execution upon the Yemeni president signing an execution warrant. Startled inmates eventually wake up to guards hauling them out of bed and forcing them to the prison courtyard. Their family might be given an hour’s notice before they are to be executed. As they realize what is happening, they are made to lie down on their stomach. A doctor determines the location of the heart through the inmate’s back. Without ceremony, several shots are fired into the heart region. Although they might be in their twenties when they die, many who are executed were convicted of a crime that they committed when they were still a legal child—and yet their body is hauled away the same as the others.

Yemen has the fifth highest execution rate in the world. In 2011, it executed 47 citizens—only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq boasted a higher number. Crimes eligible for the death penalty in Yemen include murder, rape, armed robbery, drug trafficking, honor crime, sorcery, and consensual sexual activity with a member of the same sex. Yemen—with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan—are the only four countries in the world known to put children to death.

The problem goes beyond false confessions. Undeniably, some of the Yemini juveniles sentenced to death did commit an offense; not all of their confessions were necessarily false. But the question is whether the punishment for the failings of a child can be equated to those of an adult. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the 2005 decision on the case Roper v. Simmons, “[w]hen a juvenile offender commits a heinous crime, the state can exact forfeiture of some of the most basic liberties, but the state cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity . . . From a moral standpoint, it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.”

Indeed, as juvenile offenders serve their sentences, they similarly reflect on such errors of childhood. Take, for example, the case of Bashir Mohammed Ahmed Ali Al-Dihar. In October of 2008, he pulled his jambiya (a traditonal dagger that is worn on the waist) to defend himself as three older men began to taunt him. Al-Dihar ended up fatally stabbing one of the men in the shoulder. He was around 15 years old. The crime was painted as intentional murder in court, and a judge disregarded forensic evidence of Al-Dihar’s young age. When he handed down a capital punishment sentence, the judge defiantly told the court that “Even if he was ten years old, then the punishment for a murderer is death.” In the years since the attack and sentencing, Al-Dihar has had a lot of time to reflect on his mistake: “I feel regret for what I did . . . We receive the most extreme punishment, and we were children. We should get the discipline and punishment appropriate for our age. This is what we want: that they look at us with a merciful eye.”

As life imprisonment sentences and executions for crimes committed under the age of 18 grow in number, the international community attempts to understand why Yemen continues to hand down these sentences in clear violation of both international and Yemeni law. In particular, why did Yemen sign onto the Convention on the Rights of the Child if it had no intention to uphold its principles? Some speculate that Yemen was interested in the potential international aid to which they would become to receive as a signer of the Convention. In regards to violations of Yemeni law, individual judges may be to blame. The judges themselves ultimately rule on the validity of the defendant’s confession and the estimation of his or her age. By the time the case report has reached higher levels of government, it has already been accepted that the convicted committed the crime, and was older than age 18 at the time. This lack of oversight contributes to the perpetuation of the problem.

The international community began to take notice of Yemen’s child rights violations with the execution of Hind al-Barti on December 3, 2012. Before her death, al-Barti told Human Rights Watch that she was forced to confess after investigators beat her and threatened to rape her. According to the government, al-Barti was guilty of dousing another girl in gasoline and burning her to death. At trial, al-Barti’s legitimate birth certificate proved that she was 15 years old when the crime was allegedly committed, but that evidence was thrown out. Although Al-Barti maintained her innocence throughout her trial and imprisonment, she did not seek to publicize her story. (Like many girls and women in Yemini prisons, she was likely hoping to avoid bringing shame to her family.) Nevertheless, when her case drew attention from global news networks, the Yemini government hurried to execute her after about seven years in prison.

Al-Barti’s execution went forward despite the fact that Yemen had reported to the U.N.’s Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2005 that the death penalty, torture, and other cruel punishments for those who committed crimes under the age of 18 were prohibited by their penal code. Jean Zermatten, chair of the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, spoke out in response to al-Barti’s killing: “We are not only outraged that child offenders continue to be executed in Yemen, in flagrant contravention of international law, but we are also deeply concerned over the increased number of sentences of capital punishments pronounced against children.”

The issues of child life imprisonment and child capital punishment in Yemen received even more publicity in January of 2013, when 77 inmates convicted for crimes committed as juveniles underwent a hunger strike to protest yet another death sentence for a juvenile offender. Sixty-six of the strikers signed a handwritten list of demands, including their right to a swift trial, professional age evaluation, and more humane prison conditions. Although the strike seemed to have no direct impact on the prisoners’ lives, the statement that the inmates made was effective in drawing more attention to the cause.

There are several international tactics at play to target this problem. UNICEF is working to increase the rates of birth registration in Yemen, where it reports that only 17% of children aged 5 or under have a birth certificate. UNICEF’s strategy in Yemen is to reform the registration process towards a free, universal system. They have created mobile technology to obtain birth certificates quickly and to encourage community leaders to promote birth registration to their constituents. Those improvements could, potentially, minimize instances of child life imprisonment and capital punishment sentences as juveniles grow more likely to have an official birth certificate to present as evidence.

The Yemini government is also taking some promising steps. Widespread pro-democratic protests in 2011 forced the autocratic leader Ali Abdullah Seleh to step down after 33 years in power. Under the government of new president Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, Yemen began to discuss the drafting of a new constitution in March of 2013. Hooriah Mashour, Yemen Human Rights Minister, is taking this opportunity to officially safeguard the rights of Yemini children. Mashour announced in mid-2013 that she is working with government officials and experts from other international agencies to create a National Observatory for Child Rights. Mashour told the press that “The observatory . . . will strengthen child rights and monitor violations against them.”

Yemen faced the Universal Periodic Review under the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in January of 2014. At that time, Yemen reported that its new government has made resolving human rights violations a high priority. However, the Working Group (a coalition of other U.N. members that evaluate the nation in question) still expressed concern over Yemen’s use of the death penalty. Participating nations specifically recommended that Yemen halt the use of the death penalty, especially for minors, and take steps to eliminate capital punishment completely.

Numerous worldwide human rights organizations, from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, have encouraged Yemen to take drastic steps to end the sentencing of juveniles to death. Specifically, Human Rights Watch compiled a list of recommendations in their 2013 report on child capital punishment in Yemen. The report encourages the President to use his power to reverse pending execution decrees and impose a moratorium on the death penalty nationwide, for all ages. It also urges the Yemini Ministry of Justice to establish independent review committees and provide directives to judges and prosecutors to exclude all invalid confessions and age evidence in juvenile trials. The organization also asks that the U.S., European Union, and other developed nations create their own awareness campaigns to end the cruel sentencing of children in Yemen, and push the Yemini government to complete these reforms. With the combination of all these actions, perhaps innocent lives will be saved.

Those convicted of crimes as juveniles in Yemen’s prisons have many different stories. Some, like al-Omiasy, Haikal, and al-Barti were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time; their convictions represent Yemen’s justice system at its worst, from forced confessions to faulty age evidence to illegal sentences. Others are indeed guilty of committing the crimes that they were convicted of, but they ask for mercy. They insist that they were young and naive, and should thus be allowed a second chance after a maximum of ten years in prison. Many justice systems across the globe echo that logic, offering special penal codes for offenders under 18 due to the possibility for reform that juvenile criminals show.

The child capital punishment and child life imprisonment crisis in Yemen is undoubtedly underreported, especially compared to prominent child rights issues like early marriage and brutal labor conditions. But it is no less troubling: Yemen has incarcerated for life and executed numerous individuals who most likely committed their crimes, if at all, when they were under the age of 18. These young people lost their freedom before they ever had the opportunity to lead a productive life. All the juveniles ask for is another chance—and awareness. Quaid Youssef Omar Al-Khadamy, who is on death row for a murder he committed when he says he was 15, sums up the plight of he and his peers. “I want the world to know that here they are executing [juvenile offenders]. No one cares or checks these juvenile cases. If you don’t have anybody [to help you], they just execute you, whether you are young or not.”

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