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Punishment
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Amputation has been applied in medicine for over a century. It has been applied for medical reasons to save lives, but that has not been the only application of amputation. In some cases amputation used to be and in some places still is a form of punishment. In communities such as the Arab community, amputation as a punishment method is not a new phenomenon. The Arabs tradition imposes amputation, as a punishment because they believe that the pain therewith an amputee undergoes will prevent him/her from committing the same mistake once more. Theft in some places results to a day, weeks, months or years of imprisonment, but not to the Arabs, to them theft deserves an amputation of the arm. The Arabs practice of amputation on theft has been portrayed in the adventure of Aladdin, Disney's cartoon adventure of a street rat become prince, when Princess Jasmine was threatened of having her hand cut for stealing apples. During the colonial rule, the slaves were also punished by amputation. In the adventure documentary, Roots, Kintakunte (the hero of the story) had a leg amputation for refusing to change his name to a Christian name. That was one form of punishment, others included finger and hand amputation if any one tried to learn how to write.
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In observation amputation as a punishment served and still is an effective punishment if at all there has to be a method to prevent further crime of the same kind. But human rights activists in the contrary have a different view of the matter. Human rightists have fought and still continue to fight the practice of amputation as a correctional method. They argue that amputating is not the only solution. Amnesty International has a list of countries that practice amputation as capital punishment. Among their list are, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. In Iraq punishment for different state violations include ear amputations, hand amputation, and leg amputation. The listed kinds of amputation have stirred anger in the eyes of human rights activists. And there have been calls to stop such punishment. Te ear amputation was abandoned some years back as a consequent of these calls. Iraq has a rising level of amputees. The reason behind this could be because of the rising economic difficulties caused by sanctions imposed on it, which leaves the citizens with no solution but theft. Although there have been calls from human right groups and activists from around the world to stop amputation as a correctional method, this may not be easy to implement and there is not a wide hope that the countries practicing it will stop soon. This is so because most of these punishments are implemented because of religious or traditional decree. And we all know it's not easy to abandon anything under such a circumstance. Perhaps human rights will have to cry harder to archive their goal, or may be they will never archive it.
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