26/12/2007

Inquirer Opinion
PINOY KASI
A gift to the world

MANILA, Philippines -- The United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly last week in favor of a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the use of the death penalty.

The Philippines played an important role in that resolution, yet that news didn�t seem to have made it into local media. I learned about it through the Internet edition of the National Catholic Reporter (NCR), an American weekly paper.

NCR had reason to feature the resolution, which was co-authored by 10 countries: Albania, Angola, Brazil, Croatia, Gabon, Mexico, New Zealand, the Philippines, Portugal and East Timor. Columnist John Allen noted that eight of these countries have Catholic majorities. He didn�t name them, but I thought it�d be useful if I took a bit of detour and identified the two countries without Catholic majorities: Croatia and New Zealand.

Allen�s column focused on the Catholic influence behind the moratorium. Italy, although not a co-author of the resolution, has been staunchly anti-death penalty and played a strong diplomatic role behind the resolution. Besides Amnesty International, an Italian Catholic group, called Community of Sant �Egidio, was active in pushing for a UN resolution.

There�s reason for the Philippines to be proud about this victory at the UN. Besides co-authoring the resolution, the Philippines also played a key role in saving it from being voted down. During the deliberations on the resolution, Egypt proposed an anti-abortion amendment to attach to the anti-death penalty resolution. It was clearly a diversionary tactic because many countries oppose the death penalty but not necessarily abortion. The Philippines and the Vatican (which has UN observer status) intervened, saying they would support a separate anti-abortion resolution, but did not want the abortion issue to be �instrumentalized� by being attached to an anti-death penalty position.

Allen says this move saved the resolution. In the end, 104 countries voted in favor while 54 opposed the resolution. There were also 29 abstentions and 5 absences. The countries opposed to the resolution were the United States, China, Iran, Sudan, Singapore, several Muslim countries and, curiously, a bloc of small Caribbean countries.

Cultural differences

It was not the first time such a resolution was filed with the UN. In 1994 and 1999, similar resolutions were filed to abolish the death penalty but were voted down. This time around, Amnesty International cited the increase in the number of countries that had abolished capital punishment as proof of changing world opinion. The Philippines was, again, in the limelight, because we had abolished the death penalty in 1987, restored it in 1993, only to abolish it again in 2006. The UN resolution also urges nations not to restore the death penalty once they have abolished it.

The debates in the UN were heated, with opposing countries mainly arguing that such a resolution infringed on national sovereignty.

Most European countries have abolished the death penalty; in fact, one of the requirements for membership in the European Union is that they do not use capital punishment. The example of the EU shows how politics is shaped by history and culture. In this case, there is the influence of Christianity, going back to Christ�s teachings about charity and forgiveness.

But while Christianity laid the foundations for an anti-capital punishment ethos, Christians and Christian nations were often quite violent over the last 2,000 years, employing some of the most hideous forms of capital punishment against heretics, infidels and, well, anyone who dared oppose their authority.

It was Western secular liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, that eventually converged with early Christian teachings to crystallize the distinct anti-capital punishment movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Progress was initially slow. In 1977, there were only 17 countries that had abolished the death penalty, mostly in the West. Today, there are 90 abolitionist countries from all the continents, with another 43 classified as �de facto abolitionists� because they have not executed anyone in more than 10 years.

Sadly, the United States has come out almost as a global deviant. Its Supreme Court suspended executions in 1973 but capital punishment was again allowed starting in 1976. Today, many American states no longer use capital punishment, but there are some that use it quite liberally. Texas, for example, has had more than 400 executions since 1976.

China leads the world with more than 5,000 executions this year. It isn�t communism behind this insistence on capital punishment but a Confucian legalist ethic, with its view of humans as inherently weak, and having to be controlled through law and order. It�s not surprising that Singapore, with its strong Confucian orientation, also clings to capital punishment and actually has the highest number of executions in relation to population.

Most Muslim countries have capital punishment, but Islamic law allows payment of �blood money,� where the offender can offer money to the family of the victim as restitution. If the money is accepted, the offender can be saved from execution.

Christ

Allen notes that UN resolutions often have little effect, but in this case, it does mark a �new moral consensus� among nations and �renders the situation of those states that continue to put people to death at least a bit more embarrassing.�

When we still had the death penalty, I argued that for as long as we used capital punishment we couldn�t argue against Filipinos being executed by other governments. Today, with capital punishment abolished and with the UN General Assembly resolution, we stand on higher moral ground when we try to save Filipinos overseas who have been sentenced to death.

This is not a small matter. This year alone, government officials had to negotiate with foreign governments, mainly in the Middle East, to save 19 Filipinos from execution. The Department of Foreign Affairs is still monitoring another 33 cases of overseas Filipinos sentenced to death.

The arguments against the death penalty now often center on justice, particularly the possibility of wrongful convictions. Certainly, in countries like the Philippines with inefficient and corrupt police, that risk has always been very real, with fall guys often hauled in and convicted.

Still another concern is that the death penalty can be used against political opponents. That specter remains with us in the Philippines. Even without the death penalty, the Philippine government has been implicated in many disappearances and extrajudicial executions of political dissidents.

It�s been pointed out that Christ was a political prisoner, too, and a victim of capital punishment. In that light, the UN resolution was in a way an appropriate Christmas gift to the world.

Michael Tan