Extrajudicial killing
It typically refers to government authorities, whether lawfully or unlawfully, targeting specific people for death, which in authoritarian regimes often involves political, trade union, dissident, religious and social figures.
[11] Article 3(d) of the First Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits carrying out executions without passing a prior judgement by a competent and regularly constituted court with all commonly recognized judicial guarantees for everyone taking part in the trial.
[16][17][18][19][20] Egypt recorded and reported more than a dozen unlawful extrajudicial killings of apparent ‘terrorists’ in the country by the NSA officers and the Interior Ministry police in September 2021.
[21] The 2019 Universal Periodic Review of the United Nations Human Rights Council found that in 2016, Eritrean authorities committed extrajudicial killings, in the context of a "persistent, widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population" since 1991, including "the crimes of enslavement, imprisonment, enforced disappearance, torture, other inhumane acts, persecution, rape and murder".
[30] Argentina's National Reorganization Process military dictatorship during the 1976–1983 period used extrajudicial killings systematically as way of crushing the opposition in the so-called "Dirty War"[31] or what is known in Spanish as La Guerra Sucia.
[33][34] Half of the number of extrajudicial killings were reportedly carried out by the murder squad that operated from a detention center in Buenos Aires called Escuela Mecanica de la Armada.
[40] When General Augusto Pinochet assumed power in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, he immediately ordered the purges, torture, and deaths of more than 3,000 supporters of the previous democratic socialist government without trial.
He was behind numerous assassinations and human rights abuses such as the 1974 abduction and forced disappearance of Socialist Party of Chile leader Victor Olea Alegria.
[5][46][47] During the Salvadoran Civil War, death squads achieved notoriety when far-right vigilantes assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero for his social activism in March 1980.
Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary targets of white Southerners.
The executive order approving Al-Awlaki's death was issued by Barack Obama in 2010, and was challenged by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights in that year.
The U.S. president issued an order, approved by the National Security Council, that Al-Awlaki's normal legal rights as a civilian should be suspended and his death should be imposed, as he was a threat to the United States.
The reasons provided to the public for approval of the order were Al-Awlaki's links to the 2009 Fort Hood Massacre and the 2009 Christmas Day bomb plot, the attempted destruction of a Detroit-bound passenger-plane.
However, there were conflicting witness reports, most notably Nathaniel Dingess, who told The New York Times, that agents opened fire on Reinoehl while on the phone and eating candy without verbal warning.
[78] Ahead of a three-week session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, the OHCHR chief, Michelle Bachelet, visited Venezuela between 19 and 21 June 2019.
[79] Bachelet expressed her concerns for the "shockingly high" number of extrajudiciary killings and urged for the dissolution of the Special Action Forces (FAES).
[80] Islamic Republic of Afghanistan officials presided over murders, abduction, and other abuses with the tacit backing of their government and its western allies,[81] Human Rights Watch alleged in its report from March 2015.
[93][94][95] The United Nations criticised the government under Sheikh Hasina for high rates of extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances, especially the members of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami, including former elected MPs.
[103] The Dutch secretary of Foreign Affairs Stef Blok wrote January 2019 to the States General of the Netherlands that the intelligence service AIVD had strong indications that Iran is responsible for the murder of Mohammad Reza Kolahi Samadi in 2015 in Almere and of Ahmad Mola Nissi in 2017 in The Hague.
The United Kingdom invaded Iraq in 1941 for fear that the government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani might cut oil supplies to Western nations, and because of his links to the Axis powers.
A feature in a May 2005 issue of the magazine of The New York Times claimed that the Multi-National Force – Iraq had modelled the "Wolf Brigade", the Iraqi interior ministry police commandos, on the death squads used in the 1980s to crush the left-wing insurgency in El Salvador.
[141] The move has sparked widespread condemnation from international publications[141][142][143][144][145] and magazines,[146][147][148] prompting the Philippine government to issue statements denying the existence of state-sanctioned killings.
[154] On 26 September 2016, Duterte issued guidelines that would enable the United Nations Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings to probe the rising death toll.
Hanchar and Krasouski disappeared the same day of a broadcast on state television in which President Alexander Lukashenko ordered the chiefs of his security services to crack down on "opposition scum".
American and British intelligence agents have claimed that Russian assassins, some possibly at orders of the government, are behind at least fourteen targeted killings in the United Kingdom that police authorities have termed non-suspicious.
[citation needed] In 2006, the Federal Security Service (FSB) was given the legal power to engage in targeted killing of terrorism suspects overseas if ordered by the president.
The Soviet special services also conducted extrajudicial killings abroad, most notably of Leon Trotsky in 1940 in Mexico, Stepan Bandera in 1959 in Germany, Georgi Markov in 1978 in London.
[191] In March 2022, Ukrainian banker and intelligence officer Denys Kireyev was shot in the back of the head by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
[192] During the Troubles, an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland, British security forces and intelligence agents were accused of committing extrajudicial killings against suspected IRA members.
[195][196][197] Operation Kratos referred to tactics developed by London's Metropolitan Police for dealing with suspected suicide bombers, most notably firing shots to the head without warning.
