Human rights organizations urged Honduran President...

Human rights organizations urged Honduran President Ricardo Maduro to take action against those responsible for summary executions of young people, sometimes at the hands of police. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions, Asma Jahangir, presented a report on the subject during the week. Last year, Jahangir had been made aware of multiple accounts of summary executions of young people in Honduras, which left her "shocked, perturbed and saddened." Among the accounts in Jahangir's report is one by the mother of 17-year-old Jose Geovanny Lainez. Lainez was shot in the leg by a police officer "for not stopping when he was ordered to." The extensive document highlights that police would not allow Lainez's relatives to see him in the hospital, but later delivered his body "with what was clearly a bullet hole between his eyes." The Committee of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees in Honduras (COFADEH) asked Maduro to "order an immediate investigation of police officers so their ranks may be effectively purged" and to dismiss officers who belong to repressive groups. Last January, a few days before Maduro took office, former Human Rights Commissioner Leo Valladares reported that at least 1,600 young adults, most of them over the age of 21, had been summarily executed over the past five years.