2016-06-20
Beit Lahia
A workshop under the title of “The legitimacy of Implementing Death Sentences and Publishing Primary Investigations” was carried-out by MUSAWA, in cooperation with the PHRDs Network and Al-Huriyah Forum. The workshop was held in Beit Lahia, north of the Gaza Strip, targeting 12 participants.
The workshop aimed at spreading the culture of human rights in marginalized regions and communities, introducing the community to the existence and importance of the Palestinian Human Rights Defenders Network (PHRDs), disseminating its goals and mission in order to include new individuals and institutions as members, raising legal awareness, and enabling community groups to defend their rights and realize the legal tools and mechanisms available to protect these rights. The lecturers included lawyers Ahmad Hamad and Nihal Al-Firri, both members of the PHRDs Network. Several topics were addressed throughout the workshop, including identifying who supports and who opposes death penalties while mentioning justifications for each group, guarantees related to death penalties, guarantees related to implementing death sentences in terms of their contraindications, ways of implementing death sentences, and the logic behind keeping primary investigations as confidential. At the end of the workshop, participants gave the following recommendations: the importance of unifying the efforts of all legal and societal institutions to reinforce the principle of the rule of law and take the sound legal actions to end death penalties and replace them with other punishments given that the modern penal philosophy is moving towards rehabilitating offenders and integrating them into society, and they demanded the reinforcement of the culture of human rights concepts.
This workshop comes as part of a project to empower human rights defenders, carried out by MUSAWA in both the West Bank and Gaza, with the support of the European Union.