Advertisement

Gambia, Iraq executions buck worldwide abolitionist trend

Share

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Human rights advocates the world over have been shocked and outraged by Gambia’s first executions in 27 years and an escalation in hangings in Iraq that has already sent 91 to their deaths this year.

The rash of executions in the two countries -- nine in Gambia last week and 21 in Iraq on Monday alone -- are particularly disturbing for the targeting of prisoners convicted on what appear to be politically instigated charges in secretive and unfair trials, international law experts said.

Advertisement

Yet as lamentable as the recent death row purges may be to those who monitor and censure human rights abuses, they are in stark contrast to a global trend toward abolition of the death penalty and de facto moratoriums on executions in an ever-larger number of countries.

About two-thirds of the 196 countries tracked by Amnesty International have renounced the death penalty in law or in practice, the London-based rights champions calculate. That has grown from only 16 countries that had outlawed executions before Amnesty launched its global campaign to eradicate the death penalty in 1977.

‘Even in countries like China, while we don’t know how many they have executed, we do know that they have reduced the number of crimes that can be punished by death and they have reduced the number of people executed in recent years dramatically,’ Christof Heyns, assigned by the United Nations to monitor extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said in a telephone interview from his home in Pretoria, South Africa.

On behalf of the world body’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Heyns delivered a message to Gambian President Yahya Jammeh this week to ‘strongly condemn’ the autocrat’s proclaimed intent to execute all 48 death row inmates in the tiny West African country by mid-September. Nine were executed last week, Jammeh’s government confirmed Monday, and the remaining 39 condemned prisoners have been moved from their cells to the execution site.

Heyns’ letter demanded that Gambia refrain from any further executions, calling last week’s deaths ‘a major step backwards for the country, and for the protection of the right to life in the world as a whole.” The U.N. agency rebuke joined others from Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, European nations and an expression of ‘great concern’ from the United States, which itself ranks high on annual rights agencies’ lists of countries with the most executions.

Gambia had last executed a prisoner in 1985, and had adhered to the practice increasingly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa of reducing the list of crimes for which the death penalty can be applied as well as the number of capital sentences, noted Sandra L. Babcock, a law professor at Northwestern University and founder of its Center for International Human Rights.

Advertisement

Babcock attributes the Gambia executions to ‘the whim of an unpredictable and, by all accounts, unbalanced dictator,’ and she sees little threat of Jammeh’s crackdown inspiring emulation.

‘It’s an exception to the general rule that once a nation heads down that path of refusing to carry out executions, that it leads to abolition as a matter of law over time,’ said Babcock, whose center maintains a database on the Death Penalty Worldwide.

Iraq’s mounting zeal for executions is the more disturbing, Babcock said, as many of the 1,000-plus condemned Iraqis were convicted of treason or terrorism, often ‘thinly disguised justification for prosecuting political opponents.’

Iraq has long featured in the dubious ranks of the Top Five countries carrying out the most executions each year. In 2011, China led Amnesty’s list with executions estimated at more than 1,000, but it also eliminated the death penalty for 13 crimes that previously could draw the ultimate punishment. Iran acknowledged executing at least 360 people, followed by Saudi Arabia with 82 reported executions, Iraq with 68 and the United States 43.

Despite the rise in executions in some of the most active ‘retentionist’ nations, as the rights groups refer to those that haven’t signed on to the international covenant that defines the death penalty as a human rights violation, there are positive trends even in areas where the death penalty long enjoyed broad public support, the law experts said.

The Philippines abolished capital punishment six years ago, and all republics of the former Soviet Union except Belarus have renounced the death penalty or ceased carrying it out. Malaysia and Singapore are reconsidering whether all drug-trafficking crimes should be death-penalty eligible, and China is conducting a review of all death sentences, Babcock said. All of Europe is abolitionist, and most of Latin America -- with the glaring exception of the Caribbean states -- have ceased executions.

Advertisement

The only two highly developed democracies that continue to execute are the United States and Japan, the rights groups note. And abolitionists are regaining traction in Japan that was lost 17 years ago when the Aum Shinrikyo cult attacked Tokyo subway riders with sarin gas, killing 13 and poisoning 6,000.

Moving the United States into the execution-free category is going to take time because of the 50 separate state penal codes and popular support for the death penalty in some regions, Babcock said.

But she pointed out that the rising cost of keeping the death penalty on the books in states like California, with 729 on death row, is beginning to make inroads with death penalty supporters who have been unmoved by the moral arguments against the state taking lives.

ALSO:

U.N. chief, in Iran, defends Israel’s right to exist China’s media criticize Clinton’s visit to Cook Islands

Hungary demands return of $8 million for Holocaust survivors

Advertisement

--Follow Carol J. Williams on twitter.com/cjwilliamslat

Advertisement