Juvenile Death Penalty In Islamic Countries

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As Emile Durkheim, believed society's punishments are a window through which society's “true nature” can be viewed. And an important reason why this punishment is thought of with such repugnance is that they have been historically linked to the process of torture. But if a poll were conducted tomorrow in Islamic countries, would we find considerable support for juvenile death penalty?

Despite the abolition or moratorium of capital punishment for juveniles in Islamic countries, still children are being executed. It demonstrates, simple attempts to outlaw the juvenile death penalty will not solve the problem, because the moratorium was not proclaimed for the genuine attempts to humanize the society, but rather to please the International …show more content…

It is unacceptable for the authorities to separate cases of murder or hodoud crimes from other crimes carrying the death penalty. Legislations in Islamic countries are urgently required to ensure that no person is sentenced to death for any crime, including murder and hodoud crimes, when the crimes were committed when the offender was under the age of eighteen. And even though retentionist Islamic countries appear to be moving further down the road to abolition, the political and paradoxical ramifications involved in such a venture erect barriers for minimum age of capital punishment challenges in Muslim …show more content…

Disagreements are numerous, deep and recurring. Among these, a small minority demands the immediate and strict application of hodoud, assessing this as essential prerequisite to truly defining a “Muslim majority society” as “Islamic”. Others, while accepting the fact that the hodoud is found in the textual references (the Quran and the tradition), consider the application of hodoud to be based on the moves of the society must be just and, for some, has to be “ideal” before these injunctions could be applied. Thus, the priority is the promotion of social justice, fighting against poverty and illiteracy etc. Finally, there are others, also a minority, who consider the texts relating to hodoud as obsolete and argue that these references have no place in contemporary Muslim societies.

The majority of the Muslim jurists, historically and today, are of the opinion that these penalties are on the whole Islamic but that the conditions under which they should be implemented are nearly impossible to reestablish. These penalties, therefore, are “almost never applicable”. The hodoud would, therefore, serve as a “deterrent,” the objective of which would be to stir the conscience of the believer to the gravity of an action warranting such a punishment. The penalties are Islamic, but conditions are not appropriate for their

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