By The Company They Keep
Like is drawn to like. Isn't that so? Sometimes it's enough to make one shudder in horror. Comparisons, that is. We don't tend to think, for example, that the United States has too much in common with countries like North Korea or Iran, for example. Let alone China. North Korea, Iran and China commonly exact the penalty of death on inconvenient "enemies of the state", those whose irritating habits exceed the patience of their countries' administrations. Public hangings are common and serve as public entertainment.How medieval can you get? Yet these countries, several of which formed the fated "axis of evil" are counterparts to the United States in their adherence to the death penalty as a deterrent to recidivist activities. How quaint, truly. You're dead, and that's that. Wrongly convicted? Oops. Accidents of fate will, after all, occur. Firm ideologies and a stern focus on national religious observance often go hand in hand with this type of administrative finality.
Still, it's difficult to discern otherwise why that great Democratic Republic of the U.S. would place itself firmly in the chorus of those who swear on the efficacy of death to solve problems.
Mind, the list of death-penalty retentionists is longer than that. It includes Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbados, Barbuda, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Botswana, Burundi, Cameroon, Chad, China, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Dominica, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Guatemala, guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, North (and) South Korea, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saint Christopher & Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent & Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United States of America, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zimbabwe.
This represents a motley list of countries that are dictatorships, monarchies, theocracies, and democracies. These are nations representing, in large part, the poorest of the poor, emerging economies, oil-rich kingdoms, and a complete standout: the world's super-power and champion of human rights. What on earth is the U.S. doing in there with the Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Thailand, Zimbabwe? Comrades not in arms, or economics, politics or religion, but in adherence to an ideal of the biblical eye-for-an-eye which even Israel, whose people originated the Old Testament, declines.
Now the 27-member European Union sees the time ripe for attempting once again to bring to the fore a draft moratorium for introduction and support into the United Nations General Assembly for a full ban on state executions. Which had formerly failed due to the fierce opposition of - wait for it - the United States, Singapore and other nations who rely on capital punishment to control their populations.
Should this pass it will be a non-binding agreement, the hope being that the moratorium would eventually persuade all member-countries that it is no longer meet that nations exercise such options as to take the lives of malefactors among them. That state-sanctioned and prosecuted revenge resulting in a theatre of legal murder is not the stuff of which enlightened societies engage in. It is not the action of responsible governance to take a life in payment of serious social transgressions, including murder.
To do so cheapens life, and by extension the very administrative law-makers who permit the practise. According to figures released by Amnesty International there are a mere six countries who account for roughly 90% of known executions which took place in the last year. Those countries are China, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan - and the United States. Not keeping very good company, are they?
Yet look at this improbable-appearing list of countries which declare themselves to be pro-abolitionist: Angola, Gabon, Brazil and Mexico, Croatia and Albania, Philippines and Timor-Leste. If these countries struggling with poverty-induced crime, attempting to reach into the 20th century, never mind the 21st, can see it in their best interests to forego the death penalty, how is it that the great U.S. of A cannot?
Time's up!
Labels: Justice, Political Realities, Traditions
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, October 24, 2007
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