Last year on this date, Libya — having just days prior been controversially elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council* — celebrated by conducting 18 firing squad executions.
State media reported that 14 were shot in Tripoli, and four more in Benghazi, in unspecified cases that Amnesty International “fear[ed] … fail to satisfy international standards for fair trial.”
Among them were nationals of Nigeria, Chad, and Egypt who, particularly in the first case, might have been condemned at a tribunal entirely conducted in a language they could not understand.
Qaddafi’s Libya has always been opaque about its practice of capital punishment; if it met the international outcry for more information about these 18, this site is not aware of it.
But as with Libya’s neighbor in the so-called Arab Spring, it’s one small reminder that what goes around occasionally (maybe) comes around too.
* In view of the current unpleasantness, Tripoli has recently been suspended from the body.
On this day..
- 1629: Thomas Schreiber, "thistles, thorns, and strife"
- 1868: Georg Ratkay, the last public hanging in Vienna
- 1916: The Zainuco Massacre
- 1942: Jacques Decour
- 1741: Cuffee and Quack, "chained to a stake, and burnt to death"
- 1806: Polly Barclay, accessory in the murder of her husband
- 1690: Old Mobb, witty highwayman
- 1868: Joseph Brown, for arson, murder, and money
- 1416: Jerome of Prague, the first Hussite martyr
- 1916: Robert Digby in Villeret
- 2000: Fu Xinrong, involuntary organ donor
- 1431: Joan of Arc