{"id":86928,"date":"2019-04-03T13:42:06","date_gmt":"2019-04-03T20:42:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=86928"},"modified":"2019-04-03T13:42:06","modified_gmt":"2019-04-03T20:42:06","slug":"sri-lanka-urged-to-halt-death-penalty-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/04\/03\/sri-lanka-urged-to-halt-death-penalty-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka urged to halt death penalty plan"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Courtesy Miami Herald COLOMBO, Sri Lanka<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>Amnesty International urged Sri Lanka Wednesday to halt plans to resume executions after more than four decades, saying capital punishment will not end drug-related crimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The statement by the rights group came two days after Sri Lanka president Maithripala Sirisena announced that dates have been set for the country&#8217;s first executions in 43 years amid rising alarm over drug-related crimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Authorities have intensified a crackdown on narcotics to deter smugglers from using the Indian Ocean island nation as a transit point for distribution in the region.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Biraj Patnaik, South Asia director of Amnesty International, said there is no perfect criminal justice system and the risk of executing an innocent person can never be eliminated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Courtesy Miami Herald COLOMBO, Sri Lanka Amnesty International urged Sri Lanka Wednesday to halt plans to resume executions after more than four decades, saying capital punishment will not end drug-related crimes. The statement by the rights group came two days after Sri Lanka president Maithripala Sirisena announced that dates have been set for the country&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}