Bid to end capital punishment

Press, 12 October 1979, Page 17

Bid to end capital punishment

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ROBERT CHESSHYRE

“Observer,” — London

Amnesty International has called for the abolition of capital punishment throughout the world. In the most wide-ranging international report on the subject yet produced, it finds that only 18 out of 134 countries surveyed have totally abolished the death penalty, and that there have been at least 5000 judicial executions throughout the world in the last 10 years. Its 206-page report, “The Death Penalty,” -s also concerned with the mass disappearance of over half-a-million people, almost certainly murdered with government connivance. in countries such as Argentina. Ethiopia. Cambodia (under Pol Pot) and Uganda (under Idi Amin). Although Amnesty International. which stands for the rights of everyone to hold and express his beliefs, recognises there is a fundamental difference between death sentences passed by courts and such murders, it points out that both involve a decision taken by one level or another of government to deprive an individual of his life. In a brief chapter, supported by macabre pictures of various methods

of capital punishment, including the garrotte, the guillotine, and the firing squad. Amnesty marshals the arguments against the death penalty. The law is fallible and a sentence irreversible. Where capital punishment exists for political offences, the court is quite clearly an instrument of government, and has no independence; the deterrent argument has never been fully established; and the cruelty of the punishment is self-evident, involving condemned people in perhaps years of intolerable mental anguish. The report points out that some methods involve actual torture: hanging, for example, has been known not to be instantaneous; the electric chair can cause extensive burns before the condemned person dies; and such methods as stoning to death, still employed in some countries for what are considered moral offences such as adultery, are clearly barbaric. The report acknowledges that the debate must differ between developed and undeveloped countries, in some of which the abolition of the death penalty appears a very sophisticated consideration when set against

the appalling survival problems faced by many millions of people in their everyday lives. The report acknowledges that, in the past, the debate over the death penalty has largely reflected the views and traditions of people in the West, and therefore deliberately sets out to broaden the context in which abolition is considered.

Chapter two considers international standards, emphasising that, although the death penalty is not forbidden by international law, the most recent position of the United Nations General Assembly is that

abolition is desirable as an aim, and that the crimes to which it is applied should be progressivelyreduced. Amnesty International argues that the death penalty “violates the international standards of the right to life and the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment.” By far the longest section of the report, which is available from national sections and the International Secretariat of

Amnesty International, is a country-by-country review of capital punishment practices throughout the world. From this emerges the essential arbitrariness of the punishment, and of the procedures by which it is applied and the crimes for which it is imposed. It may be imposed for embezzlement, drug peddling, adultery, hoarding, “sabotage,” and illegal currency dealings, as well as for crimes that are more widely' considered suitable reasons for execution, such as murder and treason. The countries that have

abolished capital punishment are mainly, but by no means wholly, in Western Europe and Scandinavia. It is widely used throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Amnesty International comments that one of the aspects of its use in Africa is the frequency with which people charged with political offences are tried and executed after the most summary of judicial hearings. Every Asian country' maintains the use of the

death penalty, several for drug or economic offences. Several Eastern European countries, including Russia, as well as “Western" countries such as Greece and Turkey, have also executed people recently for crimes that have not involved the taking of another’s life. In the United States, where there was a virtual suspension of the death penalty from 1967 until earlier this year while the Supreme Court and State legislatures debated the constitutional legality of capital punishment, it now looks as though a great number of the 500 people in death rows throughout the country — but particularly in the deep South — may now be executed. Latin America has a patchy record. Although many countries abolished the death penalty as early as the last century, there has been a tendency towards its re-introduction at moments of political upheaval. Several Latin American countries are among the worst offenders when it comes to officially sanctioned murder of political opponents by paramilitary groups or secret police. Argentina, for example, only restored the death

penalty in 1976, and officially it has not been used since, but up to 15,000 people have been reported missing. Most have simply vanished after being arrested or abducted by military or security agents.

The final chapter of the report is devoted to this I type of unofficial capital ■ punishment which, in I terms of numbers, is so j immensely more sign- j ificant and, in arbi- 1 trariness, so immensely j more horrifying than any judicial executions, how- | ever arrived at. But the aim of the re- • port is to stimulate 1 thought, discussion, and I action throughout the j world in the hope that it | will lead to a progressive j reduction of the number I of executions and, in the I future, to the total aboli- I tion of capital punishment I everywhere.

In a statement issued with the report, Amnesty International says: "It is not only contradictory, but a threat to humane values, for any society to proclaim that the taking of human life is the most intolerable of crimes and, at the same time, to countenance any form of execution carried out as an ! act of retribution in the I name of society it- ; self.”—O.F.N.S. Copyright, i