Methodology
All partner organisations involved in this collaboration have extensive experience either as lawyers representing death penalty cases, as organisations supporting the work of lawyers or as legal researchers on capital punishment in Asia. This regional database was developed by the partner organisations as a response to serious violations of the rights to a fair trial and adequate defence in capital cases in each of the jurisdictions - China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, and Taiwan.
We have designed and developed death penalty case briefs from each country in order to help lawyers in Asia to research and understand human rights issues impacting fair trial and defence representation across the region.
These case briefs are free to access and easily searchable. The case briefs summarise often complicated and unwieldy domestic judgments in order to allow lawyers to quickly understand cases. We hope this will contribute to increased sharing of information and experience across the region in order to help lawyers to provide the best possible defence to all individuals facing the death penalty.
Approach
The aim of the database is not to share as many death penalty cases as possible, but to include relevant, significant, or landmark cases from each jurisdiction, which highlight issues and human rights violations related to effective defence, fair trial rights, and miscarriages of justice.
The controlled list of terms, which enables searching of the case brief database, was developed through in-depth online and in-person discussions between all partner organisations and HURIDOCS. This list of terms is grounded in the experience of death penalty lawyers, and legal researchers, in Asia, international human rights law and the limitations and feasibility of the Uwazi web-based tool. Uwazi is an open-source tool developed by HURIDOCS designed for human rights defenders to capture and organise collections of information.
Each partner organisation compiled, and where relevant translated into English, the case briefs from their jurisdiction. Each case brief follows a standardised format and list of terms to ensure as much consistency as possible.
Each case brief only refers to one defendant
The database only includes cases which have already been sentenced to death, at some point.
Only cases with a publicly available judgment or which are in the public domain are included in the database.
The "Case Title" format may differ for different jurisdictions. We have included the title which is the most applicable and easily searchable for lawyers interested in carrying out further research on the case from that jurisdiction, this also includes unofficial titles.
Where possible, the latest available judgment has been uploaded to the case brief. These are the original documents so in cases from China, Indonesia and Taiwan these will be in the national language rather than English. We felt that these original judgments would be useful for lawyers from those jurisdictions and for researchers.
Limitations
This was a collaboration between partners in countries across Asia with different legal and political contexts and every attempt has been made to ensure as much consistency as possible between the case briefs from each jurisdiction.
The nature of this type of collaboration however means that there are some limitations to the data, including:
The case briefs were compiled by six different partner organisations, one in each partner country. Although we discussed and standardised the case brief list of terms to try to ensure consistency across the jurisdictions, there may be differences in the way the case backgrounds are explained or some of the language used.
Legal terms do not necessarily have the exact same meaning in each context. We have included detailed country profiles to try to explain some of the particular nuances of each legal system and the context in which the lawyers are working.
There are issues with lack of transparency around death penalty cases in each jurisdiction, and especially in China. Public judgments are not available for all cases and if they are available may only provide limited information. In the case of China other publicly available sources have been included in the case brief to try to provide as much information as possible.
As each partner organisation had varying levels of capacity and access to information to compile and upload case briefs from their country there may be a different number of case briefs for each country. This is not a reflection of the actual number of death sentences and executions in each country but merely demonstrates different levels of access to information and/or capacity. This is an ongoing project and we aim to continue to upload and share as many case briefs as possible from each country.
We chose cases which highlighted procedural issues to include in this database. This means that the case briefs are valuable in terms of qualitative data but quantitative analysis cannot be carried out.