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The death penalty versus human rights!The death penalty is irrevocable. It sends innocent people to their deaths. It has no special power to prevent crime. It is particularly cruel, calculated and cold-blooded form of killing, the ultimate inhuman and degrading punishment. It is imposed to punish prisoners for their political belief s and when inflicted for criminal offences it often becomes a judicial lottery.
The time has come to abolish the death penalty worldwide. The case for abolition becomes more compelling with each passing year. Everywhere experience shows that executions brutalize those who are involved in the process. Nowhere has it been shown that the death penalty has any special power to reduce crime or political violence In country after country, it is used disproportionately against the poor or against racial or ethnic minorities. It is often used as a tool of political repression. It is imposed and inflicted arbitrarily. It is an irrevocable punishment, resulting inevitably in the death of people innocent of any crime. It is a violation of fundamental human rights.
Over the past decade, an average of at least one country a year has abolished the death penalty, affirming respect for human life and dignity. Yet too many governments still believe that they can solve urgent social or political problems by executing prisoners. Too many citizens in too many countries are still unaware that the death penalty offers society not further protection but further brutalization. Abolition is gaining ground, but not fast enough.
The death penalty is the premeditated and cold-blooded killing of a human being by the state. The state can exercise no greater power over a person than by deliberately depriving him or her of life. At the heart of the case for abolition, therefore, is the question of whether state should this right.
When the world’s nations came together four decades ago to found the United Nations, few reminders were needed of what could happen when a state believed that there was no limit to what it might do to a human being. The staggering extent of state brutality and terror during the 1930s and 1940s was still unfolding in December 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly adopted without dissent the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Universal Declaration is a pledge among nations to promote fundamental rights as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace. These are rights, which belong to each and every individual, young and old. They are not privileges that may be granted by governments for good behavior and they may not be withdrawn for bad behavior. Fundamental human rights limit what a state may do to any individual man, woman, or child.
No matter what reason a government gives for killing prisoners and what method of execution is used, the death penalty cannot be divorced from the issue of human rights. The movement for abolition cannot be detached from the movement for human rights.
The death penalty may also encompass other human rights violations. When a state jails people solely because of their beliefs, it violates the right to freedom of belief and expression. The death penalty finally and unalterably severs a person right to hold opinions and to speak freely because it takes that person’s life.
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