According to Amnesty International’s death penalty news,

Executions [in Qatar] resumed after 12 years when two men and a woman, all Indian nationals, were executed in Doha prison on 14 June [2000]. Qader Aktar Hassan, Anis Qassem Dahnassi and Fatima Yussef al-Din Sayed had been convicted of murder. The death sentences were upheld by the Court of Appeal and ratified by the Amir.

While Qatar has retained the death penalty this whole time for a variety of crimes, and sentenced other people to death, the trio aforementioned constituted almost the only actual executions in that Gulf monarchy in the last 30 years — a dry spell so long as to lead campaigners to class Qatar as “de facto abolitionist”, meaning that in practice it’s no longer a death penalty jurisdiction. (Arun Abraham, another Indian national was shot for murder on March 10, 2003; his was the literal last Qatar execution for a generation.)

No longer so: mere days ago as of this writing, Qatar broke its moratorium with the execution of a Nepali national named Anil Chaudhary on May 21, 2020.

The reader will have noted that all the Qatar executions referenced in this post involve non-Qataris. Foreign workers make up 88% of Qatar’s 2.6 million residents.

On this day..

• 1884: Seven anarchists of La Mano Negra
• 1797: Thomas Starr, penknife murderer
• Feast Day of Rufinus and Valerius
• 1816: Philip Street
• 1662: Sir Henry Vane, Commonwealth parliamentarian
• 1972: Sanong Phobang, Thanoochai Montriwat, and Jumnian Jantra
• 1897: Choka Ebin, by his own relatives
• 2001: Jay Scott, trend-setter
• 1381: Simon of Sudbury and Robert Hales during Wat Tyler's peasant rebellion
• 1441: Corrado Trinci, Lord of Foligno
• 2008: Anandrao Sainu Koram, Naxalite informer
• 1856: Dr. William Palmer, the Rugeley Poisoner