03 June 2024 :

A court run by Yemen's Houthi rebels on June 1st, 2024 sentenced 44 people to death, including a businessman working with aid groups, on spying charges, a defense lawyer said.
The 44 were among 49 people who were detained by the Iran-backed rebels and accused of “collaborating with the enemy,” a reference to the Saudi-led coalition that has been at war with the Houthis since 2015, lawyer Abdel-Majeed Sabra said.
Four were given prison sentences, Sabra said.
Sixteen were sentenced to death in absentia, while 28 were brought before the Specialized Criminal Court in the capital Sanaa, Sabra said.
Among those sentenced to death was Adnan al-Harazi, CEO of Prodigy Systems, a Sanaa-based company that developed systems to help humanitarian groups register and verify the distribution of aid to those in need in the war-stricken country.
The Houthis detained al-Harazi in March last year after throwing stones at his company.
The ruling of June 1st included the seizure of al-Harazi’s properties, Sabra said.
Sabra accused the Houthis of torturing the suspects “physically and psychologically,” adding that they were disappeared in solitary confinement for nine months.
He said the defense team withdrew at the beginning of the trial after the judges refused to allow them to obtain a copy of the case documents, describing the trial as “unfair.”
A spokesman for the Houthis didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Thousands have been imprisoned by the Houthis during Yemen’s civil war. 
An AP investigation found some detainees were scorched with acid, forced to hang from their wrists for weeks at a time or were beaten with batons.
Courts in Sanaa and other Houthi-held areas in Yemen used to give harsh sentences to those accused of collaborating with the Saudi-led coalition. In September 2021, the rebels executed nine people who were convicted of involvement in the killing of a senior Houthi official, Saleh al-Samad, in an airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition in April 2018.
Yemen was plunged into a devastating conflict when the Houthis descended from their northern stronghold in 2014, seizing Sanaa and much of northern Yemen and forcing the government into exile.
A Saudi-led coalition including the United Arab Emirates intervened in 2015 to try to restore the internationally recognized government. The conflict has turned in recent years into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The war has killed more than 150,000 people, including fighters and civilians, and created one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

27 March 2024 :

A Houthi court sentenced 32 men, 9 of them to death, on January 23, 2024, in an unfair mass trial based on dubious charges of “sodomy,” Human Rights Watch said on March 27, 2024.
The Houthis should end their use of the death penalty and other forms of cruel and degrading punishment and provide fair trials for those charged.
In addition to death sentences that include crucifixion and stoning, the Houthi court sentenced 23 men to prison for periods of up to 10 years. Three of them were also sentenced to public flogging. The initial court indictment, dated October 17, 2023, included serious due process violations and egregious violations of Yemen’s own criminal procedural code, Human Rights Watch found.
“In an abhorrent disregard for the rule of law, the Houthis are handing down death sentences and subjecting men to public mistreatment without a semblance of due process,” said Niku Jafarnia, Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Houthis are using these cruel measures to distract from their failure to govern and provide people in their territories with basic needs.”
Human Rights Watch reviewed the official indictments against the 32 men by the Houthi courts and videos of the Houthi court proceedings posted on social media, and interviewed a lawyer with knowledge of the case. Blatant due process violations included police officers failing to provide arrest warrants and unlawfully searching and confiscating the men’s phones. The lawyer questioned whether those charged had adequate access to legal counsel.
Human Rights Watch has documented serious violations by governments in the Middle East and North Africa targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people online and using “illegitimately obtained digital photos, chats, and similar information” to prosecute them.
The Yemeni Criminal Procedures law, under articles 132 and 172, prohibits warrantless arrests as well as seizing people’s belongings in police custody. Article 181 also prohibits police interrogations without the presence of a lawyer.
The Houthi armed group took over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, in September 2014, causing the internationally recognized Yemeni government to flee. The Houthis, as a non-state actor that exercises “de facto control over [a] territory and population,” are obligated to “respect and protect the human rights of individuals and groups” living under their control.
Human Rights Watch has also documented systematic abuses in Houthi prisons. In a 2023 report, the UN Security Council’s Panel of Experts on Yemen found that “Houthi-held prisoners are subjected to systematic psychological and physical torture, including the denial of medical intervention to cure the injuries caused by the torture inflicted, which for some prisoners resulted in permanent disabilities and death.”
On October 10, 2023, another Houthi-run court in Dhamar city, a Yemeni governorate south of Sanaa, convicted 16 men of committing “immoral acts,” according to the official indictment reviewed by Human Rights Watch. According to a post on X by al-Mashhad al-Yemeni, a local news website, on February 14, 2024, Houthi forces gathered 30 men, including the 16 men who had been convicted on October 10, in a cemetery in Dhamar, and stated that they were going to execute the men by stoning them to death. The men were instead returned to detention, according to the same local news website.
Two activists and a lawyer told Human Rights Watch that the families of several defendants fled Dhamar governorate to escape the social stigma associated with the accusations. Another Yemeni activist with knowledge of the case said: “Charging and putting people on trial because of ‘immoral acts’ has catastrophic long-term consequences on people’s lives in Yemen, even if they are fabricated or made up. Those charged and their families will be impacted and stigmatized forever.”
Houthis have repeatedly arrested people who have been critical of their policies under the guise of “committing immoral acts,” Human Rights Watch said. In January 2024, the Houthis arrested Judge Abdulwahab Qatran on charges related to alcohol consumption after he criticized the Houthis’ Red Sea attacks on social media. In 2021, a Houthi court sentenced a Yemeni model and actress, Intisar al-Hammadi, as well as three other women, to prison after convicting them on charges of committing “an indecent act.”
According to Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, Houthi courts have sentenced 350 people to death since taking over the capital in 2014 and executed 11 of them.

06 February 2024 :

A Huthi-run court in Yemen has sentenced 13 people to public execution on homosexuality charges, a judicial source said on February 2, 2024, as human rights groups decried a rise in abuses by the Iran-backed rebels.
The sentences were handed down in Ibb, a province controlled by the Huthis whose attacks on Red Sea shipping since November have prompted retaliatory strikes by the United States and Britain.
Three others were jailed on similar charges, according to the judicial source, who spoke to AFP on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the press.
Another 35 people have been detained by Huthis in Ibb province on homosexuality charges, the source said.
Videos shared with AFP, which could not be independently verified, showed a judge in a court reading out the death sentences on Sunday.
It was not immediately clear when the executions were due be carried out. The sentences are open to appeal.
Death sentences are not always carried out by the Huthis, who control Yemen's most populated areas and have been engaged in a long-running war with a Saudi-led coalition.
A 2022 report by the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor said the Huthis have sentenced 350 people to death since seizing the capital in 2014, and have executed 11 of them.
NGOs say rights abuses have increased since the Huthis started their harassment of Red Sea shipping, avowedly in protest at the Israel-Hamas war.
"The Huthis 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 Huthis, 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 neighbour Saudi Arabia since 2015, a conflict that has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions on the brink of famine.

23 October 2024 :

The owner of media companies Yemen Digital Media and Yemen Live for Media Production and Satellite Broadcasting, Taha Ahmed Rashid Al-Maamari, on September 24, 2024 was sentenced to death by a Houthi-controlled court in Yemen’s capital Sana’a.
The ruling also ordered the confiscation of Al-Maamari’s properties in Yemen and abroad. The media owner has been living in Spain since 2015. 
In 2018, Al-Maamari’s offices were raided by an armed group under the pretext that the journalist supported the ‘aggression’ by a party in conflict with Yemen. 
The National Union of Journalists joins the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) have urged a reversal of the sentence and an end to the intimidation of journalists through the country’s judiciary.
Anthony Bellanger, IFJ general secretary, said:
“We condemn the tactics carried out by the de facto authorities in Sana’a, including the arbitrary sentencing against our colleague Al-Maamari, which only seeks to prevent journalists from doing their jobs and to discourage media owners from investing in the media industry in Yemen. We call on the international community and journalists’ groups across the world to advocate for overturning the unjust ruling and campaigning for the release of all imprisoned journalists in the country.”