Abolition of Death Penalty Is Necessary For Protecting Human Rights



By Thomas Hammarberg, Commissioner For Human Rights, Council of Europe
Published Monday, 5 October, 2009

A civilised society should expose the fallacy behind the idea that 
the State can kill someone to make the point that killing is wrong 
says Council of Europe Human Rights Commissioner as he articulates 
his position.

Step by step the death penalty is being abolished.  Most countries of 
the world have now stopped using this cruel, inhuman and degrading 
punishment: 94 states have decided on total abolition, 10 have 
abolished the penalty for all ordinary crimes and 35 others have not 
executed anyone for more than ten years. Europe is nowadays close to 
being a death penalty free zone. However, the abolitionist cause is 
not yet won.

The most populated countries in the world retain the death penalty: 
China, India, the United States and Indonesia. This means that the 
majority of the world’s people live in countries which continue to 
practice execution as punishment. In election campaigns in the United 
States, this is a taboo issue, and even the more progressive 
candidates refrain from raising it for fear of a backlash.

Politicians have problems in relating to public opinion on this issue 
also in other countries. The Russian Federation gave an undertaking 
when joining the Council of Europe 13 years ago to do away with the 
penalty. A moratorium was introduced but the Duma does not appear to 
be ready yet for a de jure abolition.

After the monstrous terrorist attack against the school in Beslan in 
September 2004, there were strong emotions in favour of executing the 
sole attacker who survived the disaster. However, the judicial 
authorities in Russia were loyal to the moratorium decision also in 
this extreme situation; the death sentence was transformed into life 
imprisonment.

Surveys of public opinion about the death penalty have usually shown 
a majority to be in favour of retaining this punishment. This has 
been the case particularly when a brutal and widely publicised murder 
has taken place.

However, opinion polls on this issue are not easy to interpret. There 
is a wide difference between asking for a gut reaction to brutal 
crime and soliciting a considered opinion about the ethics and 
principles relating to legalised State killing.

It is significant that there have been no widely-based demands for 
the re-introduction of the death penalty in European countries. Any 
such proposals are not coming from larger political parties.

Still, I believe it is important to present again the very strong 
arguments against killing as a judicial sanction. This is a debate 
which will go on and younger generations should be able to benefit 
from our past experiences.

It can be convincingly argued that the death penalty is ineffective. 
It has not had the intended deterrent effect. The crime rate is not 
lower in countries which have retained the penalty and has not gone 
up where it has been abolished. If anything, the trend is the opposite.

What is demonstrated, however, is the real risk of executing an 
innocent person. No system of justice is infallible, judges are human 
beings and mistakes are made in the court room. When the convicted 
person is executed, it is too late to correct the mistake. There have 
been a number of such cases – some of them revealed afterwards 
through new DNA techniques - and there are no guarantees that they 
will not occur in the future.

It has also been demonstrated that the death penalty regime has a 
clear tendency to discriminate against the poor and against 
minorities. Privileged people with contacts run much less risk of 
such punishment than others who have committed the same crime. The 
greatest risk is run by those who are marginalised; they tend to be 
at a disadvantage in the judicial process – also in death penalty cases.

These arguments are strong. However, it is not only a question of 
effective crime prevention, judicial certainty or prevention of 
discrimination; it is about the essence of human rights.

The Universal Declaration states that no one shall be subject to 
torture or to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. 
There have been attempts to find means of executing with little pain 
in order to make the process more “humane”. This has failed; there 
have been recent examples of prolonged suffering in the electric 
chair or when a person is injected with poison. Even if this could be 
avoided, it does not reduce the psychological pain when waiting for 
the execution.  The death penalty is cruel, inhuman and degrading – 
and will always be so.

The key argument against the death penalty is that it violates the 
right to life. State killing is indeed the ultimate denial of human 
rights. That is why it is so essential that we continue to act for 
abolition.

The Council of Europe has been in the forefront in this effort. All 
member states have ratified Protocol 6 of the European Convention 
concerning abolition in peace time and the majority has also agreed 
to be bound by Protocol 13 regarding abolition in all circumstances 
(including in situations of war). Those remaining states should join.1

It should also be made clear that Belarus can only aspire to 
membership or even status as observer after it has abolished the 
death penalty. Governments in the United States and Japan should be 
reminded that their status as observer is questioned because of their 
position on this issue.

In the meantime the successful diplomatic initiatives in the United 
Nations should continue. A resolution was adopted with broad majority 
in the General Assembly in 2007 which recommended a global moratorium 
on the use of the death penalty. A similar resolution was agreed in 
2008, again stressing that the moratorium should be established “with 
a view to abolishing the death penalty”.2

Our position on the death penalty indicates the kind of society we 
want to build. When the State itself kills a human being under its 
jurisdiction, it sends a message: it legitimises extreme violence. I 
am convinced that the death penalty has a brutalising effect in 
society. There is an element of “an eye for an eye” in each execution.

A civilised society should expose the fallacy behind the idea that 
the State can kill someone to make the point that killing is wrong.

http://www.egovmonitor.com/node/29214