UN human rights experts condemn execution of teenage girls in Somalia

[News_Editor]

UN human rights experts condemn execution of teenage girls in Somalia

2010-11-12 05:01:24 GMT+7 (ICT)

UNITED NATIONS (BNO NEWS) -- United Nations human rights experts on Thursday strongly condemned the recent public execution of two teenage girls by anti-government militant group Al-Shabaab last month.

The two girls, Ayan Mohamed Jama, 18, and Huriyo Ibrahim, 15, from Somalia's Hiiran region, were executed by a firing squad in the central town of Beledweyne as Al-Shabaab regional commander Sheikh Yusuf Alil Ugas said they were spying for Ethiopian and Somali governments.

"We were horrified to learn of the public execution, reportedly carried out by Al-Shabaab insurgents on 27 October in front of hundreds of residents in Beledweyne," the six experts said. "We join the Somali people in condemning, in the strongest terms, these latest brutal summary executions of two young women convicted without any semblance of due process."

The experts also called on the parties involved in the conflict to immediately stop committing acts of extrajudicial executions, torture, stonings, decapitation, and amputations as well as other violations on human rights related to freedom of religion.

The UN experts called the recent actions of groups such as Al-Shabaab as taking Somalia back into the stone age. Somalia has not had a functioning central government since 1991 as it has been torn apart by decades of conflict.

According to the experts, regular indiscriminate attacks in the capital, Mogadishu, have caused thousands of deaths and injuries, as well as destruction of property as whole neighborhoods razed to the ground. The attacks were featured by heavy artillery, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and roadside bombs have been used, as well as targeted assassinations.

Shamsul Bari, the Independent Expert on Somalia, added that constant reports of sexual and gender-based violence, including rape and female genital mutilation, among the 1.4 million displaced Somalis and in other parts of the society.

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