October 20th, 2021 at 03:14 pm
A 55-year-old single mother of nine children has been sentenced to death despite her plea for clemency.
Hairun JalmanI from Malaysia has been convicted of drug possession and distribution charges.
Tawau High Court in Sabah sentenced her to death last week after being caught with 113.9g of meth in 2018.
A video of her crying and begging for forgiveness while being escorted by an officer from the courtroom hit social media and has generated numerous reactions across the globe.
Following the emergence of the emotion-triggering video, Amnesty International Malaysia has condemned how women are treated in the Southeast Asian country.
According to the humanitarian organization, women who are accused of drug-related offences are subjected to violence, abuse and exploitation but in sentencing them, the courts fail to consider the extrajudicial assaults they had already suffered.
It further disclosed that 95% of all women given the death sentence in 2019 were convicted for drug-related offences.
“Hairun’s life chances were stacked against her. She was a single mother in Malaysia’s poorest state trying to support 9 children. Her case is an example of how Malaysia’s death penalty punishes the poor w/ particular discriminations against women,” Amnesty International said.
It went further to entreat the Malaysian government to abolish the death penalty just as about 108 other countries have done.
“Why is the right to life so easily denied by the govt? Who is kept safe when a single mother of nine is sentenced to death and removed from her children? What justice is served when the structural inequalities and oppressions that created the conditions for her charge remain?”
source : pulse.com.gh