Premeditated murder, attempted assassination of the President...

Premeditated murder, attempted assassination of the President, conspiracy against the sovereignty of the State, and acts of terrorism, are capital crimes in the Maldives.
The Maldives continues to issue and implement flogging sentences for certain crimes, notably extramarital sex. The vast majority of those sentenced are women.
The death penalty is widely supported in the Maldives as either adherence to stricter interpretations of Islamic Sharia, or as a perceived method of reducing violent crime.
Those under sentence can appeal to the President who has the power to grant clemency. While the Maldives still issues death sentences, these have traditionally been commuted to life sentences by presidential decree.
In April 2012, MP Ahmed Mahloof and several other MPs forwarded a bill proposing that the enforcement of death penalty be mandatory in the event it was upheld by the Supreme Court. This would halt the current practice of the President commuting such sentences to life imprisonment. Prior to Mahloof’s motion, two members had forwarded similar bills to enforce death penalty. But after lengthy debates in multiple parliament sessions, both withdrew it.
On 4 July 2012, Chief Justice Ahmed Faiz said the death penalty could be executed within the existing justice system of the Maldives. Following the moment of silence observed outside the High Court in honour of the lawyer Ahmed Najeeb, who was found brutally stabbed to death few days before, the Chief Justice told reporters that Maldives legal system is based on Islamic Sharia which allows the death penalty to be implemented. Following Najeeb’s murder – the sixth homicide recorded in the first six months of 2012 alone – Home Minister Mohamed Jameel Ahmed and Attorney General Azima Shukoor, as well as other prominent lawyers and lawmakers, publicly endorsed their support for implementing capital punishment to deter increasing crime rates. According to Chief Justice Faiz, each and every ruling of the court must be enforced for the country to see the effectiveness of the judiciary. More than 10 people have been sentenced to death in the past decade, out of which none have been executed by the authorities tasked with the role, he observed. For the past 60 years, the state has been commuting these death sentences to life imprisonment (25 years). “The Maldives judicial system is constructed in a manner whereby another body is responsible to enforce the punishment once it is decided by the court,” Faiz explained. “Not only in murder cases, but if all court verdicts on all crimes are properly enforced, we will see the [positive] outcomes of these verdicts,” the Supreme court judge noted.
In October 2012, the government announced its intention to introduce a bill to the People’s Majlis in order to guide and govern the implementation of the death penalty in the country. In December 2012, the Attorney General’s Office completed drafting a bill outlining how the death sentence should be executed in the Maldives, with lethal injection being identified as the state’s preferred method of capital punishment. However, earlier 2013 religious NGO Jamiyyathul Salaf has called on Attorney General Azima Shukoor to amend the government’s draft bill on the implementation of death penalty, urging that convicts be beheaded or shot instead of given lethal injection. The bill is currently pending approval by parliament, and has given rise to dissenting opinions on the matter.
In 2012, two new death sentences were handed down in Maldives, according to Amnesty International.
In 2011, for the first time in recent years, no new death sentences were handed down in Maldives.
In the previous decade, 14 death sentences were passed. However, these sentences were never enforced and were commuted to life imprisonment under the power vested to the President in Clemency Act.
Maldives is a State Party to two UN treaties, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which forbid capital punishment for crimes committed by persons below 18 years of age. However, in May 2013, the Juvenile Court sentenced two teenagers to death for the first time in its history.
The last person to be executed in the Maldives after receiving a death sentence was in 1953 during the first republic of President Mohamed Ameen. Hakim Didi was charged with attempting to assassinate President Ameen using black magic.
In March 2011, in its response to the recommendations received under the Universal Periodic Review of the UN Human Rights Council, the Maldives rejected the recommendation to sign/ratify the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR. However, it took note of the recommendations to establish a moratorium on State executions with a view to formally abolishing the death penalty.
On 22 May 2013, the UN country team in the Maldives issued a statement calling for the abolition of both corporal punishment and the death penalty in the Maldives. “The Maldives made a commitment following its Universal Periodic Review by the United Nations Human Rights Council in 2010 to maintain a moratorium on the death penalty,” the UN statement read. The UN added that flogging as a punishment was prohibited under the Maldives’ international commitment “to prohibit torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”
On 20 December 2012, the Maldives abstained from the Resolution on a Moratorium on the Use of the Death Penalty at the UN General Assembly. In 2010, for the first time, the Maldives had voted in favour of the Resolution. The Maldives had voted against such UN resolutions previously in 2007 and 2008.