DAY 602 | Yemen: Houthis sentence 13 to public execution on homosexuality charges

"The Houthis are ramping up their abuses at home while the world is busy watching their attacks in the Red Sea," said Niku Jafarnia, a Yemen researcher for Human Rights Watch.

A court of the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen has sentenced 13 people to public execution on homosexuality charges, the French wire service AFP reported on Tuesday. 

Photo: Crowd watching a public execution in Yemen

Another 35 people have been detained for similar charges.

The ruling was made in Ibb, a Houthi-controlled province from which the jihadist group has been launching attacks on commercial ships in the Red Sea since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, opening a war that reached its four-month mark this week. 

The Houthis have a history of sentencing more people to death than they actually execute, according to a 2022 report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, which counted 350 death sentences by the group since 2014, only 11 of which have resulted in execution. But the group's attacks on global trade could change this calculus.

"The Houthis are ramping up their abuses at home while the world is busy watching their attacks in the Red Sea," said Niku Jafarnia, a Yemen researcher from Human Rights Watch.

"If they really cared about the human rights they purport to be standing up for in Palestine, they wouldn't be flogging and stoning Yemenis to death," she told AFP.

In December, Yemeni human rights activist Fatima Saleh Al-Arwali was sentenced to death on charges of spying for the United Arab Emirates, a member of the military coalition that intervened in Yemen in 2015 in support of government forces.

The Houthis, from Yemen's mountainous north, belong to the Zaidi minority, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

The hardline force, founded with the aim of pushing for a theocracy, emerged in the 1990s, rising up over alleged neglect of their region.

It has been fighting a pro-government coalition led by powerful neighbor Saudi Arabia since 2015, a conflict that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions on the brink of famine.

A UN Security Council report in 2023 relayed that "the Houthis are [reportedly] detaining children as young as 13 years old," some of whom "are accused of 'indecent acts' for their alleged homosexual orientation."

Houthis have disrupted a fifth of global shipping since October

The group subscribes to a radical form of Shi'a Islam, and frequently proclaims its official slogan, "God is great, death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews, victory to Islam." 

Their attacks on ships in the Red Sea since October have disrupted a fifth of global shipping of food, fuel, and medicine, according to the US State Department, with many companies opting to travel a much longer route around the southern tip of Africa rather than risk attack. 

Since January, the United States and allies have been retaliating with airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen.

Source: Agence France Presse, February 8, 2024

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