VATICAN SLAMS US PLAN TO LIVESTREAM EXECUTION AS ‘UNACCEPTABLE’

Sun 11 October 2026:

A senior Vatican official condemned US plans to livestream the execution of former US Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, describing the proposal as “unacceptable.”

“I do not know for what purpose. It is certainly unacceptable to turn death into a spectacle. However guilty the person may be, there are other ways,” Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin told reporters.

His remarks followed a statement by US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that the public would be able to watch the execution of Hasan by firing squad on Dec. 3.

Parolin said it was “truly incomprehensible” that such a method would be considered in the present day.

Hasan was sentenced to death for fatally shooting 13 unarmed US soldiers at Fort Hood military base in Texas in 2009.

The planned broadcast would reportedly mark the first public execution in the US in nearly a century.

John Galligan, a civilian lawyer advising Hasan, said that he was the first person to inform Hasan of the date of his sentence after seeing a social media post about it from the Pentagon’s chief spokesman this week.

Galligan told the BBC that the event is being treated like a “carnival” and is the “closest thing to a lynch mob mentality that we used to see in the olden days”.

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Who is Hasan and what was his motive?

Hasan, a native of Virginia, admitted to fatally shooting 13 unarmed soldiers in a crowded medical building on Fort Hood, a US military base in Texas, in 2009.

He said during his court-martial in 2013 that he believed he was protecting Muslims and the Taliban in Afghanistan from the US military.

Hasan was shot during the attack and now uses a wheelchair.

Can anyone watch the execution?

It remains unclear whether any restrictions would be implemented on a livestream to limit who can watch the execution. Rules about how executions are carried out and who can watch vary by state, and the military also has its own rules.

A number of states require some form of public viewing of executions. Many require journalists to be present. Some states allow the person being executed to invite people, and some allow ordinary citizens to volunteer as witnesses.

Under US Army Regulation 190-55 which governs military executions, only certain categories of people, such as journalists and relatives, are permitted to be present. People aged under 18 are excluded.

Critics of the plan to livestream Hasan’s death say it will be hard, if not impossible, to prevent children from watching it live or in recordings afterwards.

While there were more than 2,700 executions across 17 countries last year, only two nations carried them out publicly.

Eleven public executions were known to have been carried out in Iran in 2025 and another six in Afghanistan, according to Amnesty International.

Is it legal to livestream an execution?

The UN warned on Friday that livestreaming the execution would “constitute a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” that is banned under international law.

UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said during Friday’s press briefing in New York that the “possibility of…a government executing someone in public or in front of live cameras, frankly, is abhorrent”.

It’s unclear how or where the US military plans to transmit the stream, and whether it would violate US laws or regulations. Legal challenges are expected in any case.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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