Worry over greater use of death penalty

Press, 8 October 1987, Page 23

Worry over greater use of death penalty

PA Wellington Amnesty International is worried the death penalty is being used more frequently throughout the world — especially to punish drug offenders, its deputy director says. Twenty-three countries now use it, according to the human rights organisation’s latest report However, it says, “despite the hundreds of executions, there is no clear evidence that the death penalty has any identifiable effect in preventing drug trafficking and abuse.” Amnesty wants the death penalty abolished. One pressing reason for doing so, it says, is the risk of executing the innocent Larry Cox, deputy director of Amnesty, on a brief visit to New Zealand, said New Zealand was in a very good position to help stop it “People in New Zealand are in a privileged position. They have the freedom to act and speak out... but along with the freedom comes the responsibility to speak out” he said. New Zealand was also seen by the rest of the world as independent which added weight to its voice whenever it spoke. The New Zealand branch of Amnesty was concerned about the death penalty. The chairwoman, Betty Mason, conceded it was a difficult issue — especially when it

came to drug offenders. Her view, however, was that the death penalty brutalised society: if the State could take life, someone might feel it was all right for them to kill their enemies, too. In the case of Malaysia — the scene of the Cohen trial — the number of drug addicts was rising, in spite of the use of the death penalty, the aim of which was to combat drug abuse, she said. “The problem with drugs is deeper than that It is more profitable for peasants to grow poppies (which are turned into heroin) than other crops,” she said. The Amnesty report raised other issues. It says executing drug offenders raises the danger of drug traffickers killing more readily to avoid capture and only minor traffickers and addicts will be executed while the big drug bosses escape. Also, says the report, “increasing the severity of penalties will play into the hands of organised crime, involving hardened criminals prepared to face the attendant dangers.” A 10-year study by an American psychologist, John Wilkes, recently published has found that killings actually dropped slightly just after the death penalty ended in some countries. In spite of this, support for the death penalty has risen between 30 per cent

and 70 per cent in the United States in the last 20 years. Mr Cox said that other human rights abuses in the Pacific had. also prompted his visit Amnesty had, however, uncovered no human rights abuse of prisoners in New Zealand, he said. The use in Fiji of imprisonment to Intimidate people and silence them was worrying, as were the trillings and subsequent laxity of the French judges in New Caledonia when it came to bringing to justice those who had allegedly killed Kanak independence campaigners. Mr Cox said he was also, concerned about the worrying trend towards deporting political refugees. In the Pacific, Papua New Guinea has been criticised for deporting fleeing Indonesians back to Irian Jaya. But countries like Britain and the United States, too, have deported political refugees. Britain has also taken the step of demanding visas from Tamils fleeing from Sri Lanka — the only Commonwealth citizens to have this imposed on them. The United States has intercepted and sent back boatloads of Haitians. Mr Cox said to fight these and other abuses New Zealand Amnesty needed more members.