In a ground-breaking
move, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has voted to place a
moratorium on executions, with 104 member states favouring the
resolution and 54 opposing it. As a result, the death penalty could be
abolished de facto even in countries that retain it on their statute
books. A UNGA resolution of this kind has no binding legal force but
this one is a significant advance over the earlier initiatives that
merely proclaimed universal abolition to be a desirable objective. The
heated debate that preceded the adoption of the resolution reminds us
that a huge amount of work needs to be done before this cruel, inhuman,
and degrading punishment becomes history. Some countries harped on the
fact that the death penalty was sanctioned in international law and
sought to depict the attempt at establishing a universal moratorium as
interference in the judicial systems of member states. The appeal to
national sovereignty is an all-too-familiar response from some
developing countries. Other opponents of the UNGA resolution invoked
cultural and religious practices in justification of retaining capital
punishment.
Data available for 2006 show that 133 countries have done away with the
death penalty in law or in practice. Over that year, 25 countries
carried out executions and 91 per cent of the known executions were the
work of six countries — China, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and
the United States (in that order). Confirmed legal executions declined
by more than 25 per cent between 2005 and 2006. The New Jersey Assembly
recently replaced the death penalty with a sentence for life without
parole — the first such law adopted since the 1976 reinstatement of the
death penalty in the U.S. In India, the death penalty is supposed to be
handed down only in the rarest of rare cases. But these are modest
mercies. The time has certainly come for humankind to do away with the
barbaric penalty and India needs to join the ranks of those who have
seen the light.
http://www.hindu.com/2008/01/07/stories/2008010762371000.htm
Copyright
© 2008, The Hindu.
