I. Background

Yemen carries out one of the highest numbers of death penalty executions in the world. In 2011, according to data collected by Amnesty International, Yemen carried out at least 47 executions, the 5th highest worldwide after China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.[1] Death sentences are administered for a wide variety of offenses, including drug trafficking and consensual same-sex sexual activity.[2]

In addition, Yemen’s judicial system often fails to provide fair trials, meaning that defendants, adults and juveniles, may be sentenced to death after giving forced confessions or based upon testimony they gave without access to legal counsel. In 2010, the United Nations Committee Against Torture stated that it:

Remain[ed] seriously concerned at the State party’s failure in practice to afford all detainees, including detainees held in State security prisons, with all fundamental legal safeguards from the very outset of their detention. Such safeguards comprise the right to have prompt access to a lawyer and an independent medical examination, to notify a relative, and to be informed of their rights at the time of detention, including about the charges laid against them, and to appear before a judge within a time limit in accordance with international standards.[3]

Some juvenile offenders interviewed for this report said that police investigators tortured them to extract confessions and described in detail the methods of torture and ill-treatment they had faced in police stations, including severe beatings, prolonged suspension, and threats.[4] Human Rights Watch has documented mistreatment in Yemen detention facilities including beatings, insufficient food and water, and prolonged incommunicado detention.[5] A group of eight Yemeni civil society organizations, in a 2009 submission to the Committee against Torture, also documented twelve cases of torture in state custody, including three cases of children who were tortured in prisons during the investigative detention phase.[6] Police officers beat the children with sticks and electric cables, suspended them for long periods of time, and threatened to rape them, according to the report.[7]

Yemen’s failure to implement basic fair trial protections remains problematic in all death penalty cases, but violates the international legal commitments it has made to protect children’s rights to an even higher degree. In the past six years, Yemen has executed at least 16 individuals who claimed to be under 18 at the time of their alleged offense, according to data collected by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Amnesty International, and local civil society groups.

Yemen also has one of the lowest rates of birth registration worldwide. Between 2000 and 2010, according to UNICEF, the country registered only 22 percent of all births.[8] Only 16 percent of births in rural areas were registered, and a mere 5 percent of births among the poorest one-fifth of Yemen’s population.[9] Yemenis interviewed for this report as well as for other Human Rights Watch research placed little importance on knowing their exact age, and many knew at most their birth year, instead of the exact date or month of their birth.

In addition to the 20 juvenile offenders sentenced to death whose cases are included in the appendix, Yemen’s public prosecution has called for the death penalty in pending cases of at least 186 other alleged juvenile offenders, according to the Yemeni National NGO Coalition on Child Rights (YNGOC) which has reviewed their case files and found evidence that they may have been under 18 at the time of their alleged offense.[10]

Though most juvenile offenders lack official birth certificates, Yemen’s judiciary has yet to implement impartial and accurate mechanisms to determine their age in criminal proceedings. Human Rights Watch reviewed five state-ordered forensic reports that allegedly established individuals accused of murder had passed 18 years of age. All five age assessments relied on wrist x-rays, or on arm and wrist x-rays, though assessments based on these tests are known to be unreliable, particularly for children between 16 and 18 years of age. For example, the Netherlands government Committee on Age Determination found that, “The exclusive use of the hand-wrist region means that about 90% of all girls and 50% of all boys reach the physical criterion for exclusion before they reach the age of 18, which means they may be unjustly refused treatment as minors,” while the British Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health has stated that x-ray tests or “radiological assessment is extremely imprecise and can only give an estimate within two years in either direction.”[11] (See Section III for further details.) 

In November 2011, in the 10th month of an uprising seeking his resignation after 33 years of rule, then-President Ali Abdullah Saleh agreed to cede power to his deputy, Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi. Under the terms of the power transfer, the transition government agreed to convene a Conference on National Dialogue to implement a series of democratic reforms. The promised measures included judicial reform, protection of human rights, and “the adoption of legal and other means to strengthen the protection and rights of vulnerable groups, including children.”[12] Failing to remove juvenile offenders from death row would violate the guiding principles of all three measures.