18/12/2000

UN Receives Anti-Execution Petition

UNITED NATIONS (AP) � Secretary-General Kofi Annan lent his support to a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty Monday after receiving a petition signed by 3.2 million people seeking an end to state-sponsored executions.

Activist Sister Helen Prejean, representatives of Amnesty International, and a Rome-based interfaith group, the Sant' Egidio Community, delivered the petition as demonstrators outside U.N. headquarters rallied to end capital punishment.

"We are right now at a new moment in terms of the American people's recognition that the death penalty does not serve us as a country," said Prejean, whose work as a spiritual adviser to a death row inmate was depicted in the 1995 film "Dead Man Walking."

"A moral threshold has been crossed," she said.

Prejean said the petition is aimed at pressing the U.N. General Assembly to pass a resolution halting executions, then eventually banning them.

Amnesty International Chairman Paul Hoffman cited the fact that while fewer than 30 countries had abolished the death penalty in 1970, more than 110 have such bans today.

At Monday's ceremony, Annan backed the campaign, questioning how the taking of one life can justify taking another.

"Can the state, which represents the whole of society and has the duty of protecting society, fulfill that duty by lowering itself to the level of the murderer, and treating him as he treated others?" Annan said.

Annan praised the countries which have signed a protocol aiming to abolish the death penalty worldwide.

"If I may be permitted to express a personal view, I believe that those states are right," he said. "The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process. And I believe that future generations, throughout the world, will come to agree."

As governor of Texas, President-elect Bush presided over nearly 150 executions. In 2000 alone, 40 people were put to death in Texas, the most of any state in U.S. history.

Prejean acknowledged that changing public perception of capital punishment in the United States is one of the biggest challenges facing the anti-death penalty movement.

Prejean argued against the position that capital punishment serves as a deterrent to crime, and that executions provide justice for the families of murder victims.