Death Penalty: Group Picks Holes in UN Convention

The Supreme Council for Sharia in Nigeria (SCSN) has threatened to make Nigeria ungovernable if the Federal Government ratifies the United Nations (UN) Convention on Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Punishment.

The council said if government ratifies the convention, the death penalty and other forms of capital punishment would become illegal.

Reacting to pressures from sections of the international community on Nigeria to ratify the convention, the SCSN said at a press conference in Kaduna at the weekend that abolition of the death penalty would constitute an assault on Islam and sharia in Nigeria.

SCSN President, Dr Ibrahim Datti Ahmed, vowed that the muslim community in the country would defy the law if it becomes operational.

"If the Federal Government is that stupid and insensitive to ignore our feelings, then we will mobilise the people to get rid of this government; we will encourage civil disobedience, no matter the consequences, because it is better to defy the Federal Government than to disobey the law of God." he said.

He explained that the abolition of the death penalty was contrary to the koranic injunction that whoever willfully kills another person should be killed.

Said she: "We will liaise with Christian leaders in the country, to remind them of the biblical provision of an eye for an eye, it is the same thing in the koran, it is the same thing in the tora (the Jewish Holy Book).

"We are indeed aware of European and American Parliamentary pressure groups actively lobbying for this legislation, and, since we have never interfered in their domestic legislative processes, we take serious exception to their rude and arrogant intrusion in our affairs, in this regard, as a sovereign country.

"The SCSN cautions the Federal Government to take cognisance of the religious sensibilities of Nigerians and the implications of the plan to abolish the death penalty, on the already precarious state of security of lives and property in Nigeria.

The council wishes to remind Nigerians that democracy is not on a government chosen by the people but also one that operates on the basis of wishes and aspirations of the people," he stated.

The Daily Trust

NIGERIA: In defence of capital punishment

The debate against capital punishment in Nigeria began half-heartedly in 1994; and thereafter it quietly died down. The sponsors of the debate � within and outside the country � were clever guys who correctly saw no hope of winning their battle to expunge it from Nigeria's statutes. For General Sani Abacha � the graveyard of bravery � was the one in power. Now, under better and more amenable clime, they have rushed back.

I personally support the abolition of the death penalty, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo told a visiting European Union delegation, because I had been close to being killed. Both points raised by Obasanjo were, however, quite irrelevant. No one was interested in knowing how close he was to being killed; and, in any case, statesmen usually allow others to raise such matters. And for the EU, unless he could impose his personal opinion on the nation for them, its delegation didn�t have to hear it.
But the tragedy of a Third World nation and its one-man show regime is that Obasanjo may well succeed in imposing his personal opinion on the nation as its new policy. We are looking for foreign investment, aren't we? And article came after article, and the lecture circuits by Non-Governmental Organisations were staged all over the place � all dedicated to seeing the end of the death penalty in Nigeria.

But what are the arguments against the death penalty and why should anybody wish to oppose such a great struggle as the one dedicated to so sublime an objective as the preservation of life?

First, lets get things straight. Despite all the noise by the Western world, and despite all the provisions of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights and the Protocols of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, there is nothing like the right to life. Life is a gift.

And like all gifts, life can be taken away; by the law, when its relevant provisions are flouted; or, by the Giver, when its appointed term is over. But once it is given to him, man has the right to protect and preserve it, and to live in freedom or to die trying to do so.

It is in recognition of this right that Section 31 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria provided that: "Every person has a right to life, and no one shall be deprived intentionally of his life, save in the execution of the sentence of a court in respect of a criminal offence of which he has been found guilty in Nigeria." This sounds definitive and final, just as it ought to be.
It is not something new. It has the whole of history behind it. Though there is no need to bring in any religious reasons in defence of capital punishment, I can't help but note that in the Old Testament Mosaic Law is said to have specified at least 36 capital offences; and in the New Testament there is nothing to preclude its imposition, as the right of the state to put criminals to death has been taken for granted. Recently His Holiness Pope John Paul II has recently justified the death penalty intrinsically as just retribution but only as an extraordinary means of defending society in cases where this is the only effective means of doing so.

Of course Islam has never found it necessary to relax its adherence to the doctrine of lex talionis.

Inspite of all the history behind it, however, for reasons that are well known, it is now being questioned all over the world. With the arrival of the European Unionists and the reception accorded them in Aso Rock, the debate has found reason to reopen in Nigeria. Which is a great pity.

If at the suggestion of a few Europeans we all cringe and begin to question what we call the supreme law of the land, then we clearly have a big problem. It is either we have no faith in the Constitution; or the Constitution is not really supreme even in our subconscious. Or perhaps we prefer a life of dictation by the West. But even then we shouldn't get things mixed up. If we borrow technology from them, it is because they have it, and we need it. We shouldn�t continue the attempt to borrow our moral or ethical values from them, because they don�t have them, and we have no need for these. The Western civilization is bereft of any moral, ethical and artistic values that can rise above the profit motive. No, these people have nothing to teach the world about civilization; and they should therefore keep quiet and stop the moralization about human rights and other freedoms. There was no time in history when the West ever became famous for morals or for exporting it.

But, specifically, what are the arguments of the opponents of capital punishment? Almost all opponents of capital punishment insist that imposing a penalty of death amounts to a denial of the right to life for those thus killed; and a demeaning of life for those who witness it.

Death penalty, they argue, is rooted in a primordial revenge instinct, which is at variance with man�s best nature; and, moreover, its administration by law enforcement agencies is neither decent nor humane.

In addition, they posit their opposition to the death penalty because, they say, it is terminal and irreversible, and, in situations where an innocent person is wrongly convicted, there is no way to make amends. By the time the mistrial is realised the mistake has already been made; the person to get reprieve is already gone. But the most important and telling argument put forward by the opponents of death penalty is their claim that it is absolutely ineffective as a deterrent to further crime.

Now, let's take all their objections one by one.

The theory of the death penalty being a denial of right can hardly stand any scrutiny; because, to begin with, there is no such thing as a right to life under all circumstances, which is the unvoiced assumption that underlies any belief in this right. It appears only reasonable that one who deliberately and willfully kills another forfeits the right to the enjoyment of his own. There is no price to life other than life, and the murderer is not denied anything by anyone. He is just getting his just desserts.
Whoever kills must be killed; that is the natural law. And there can never be any demeaning of human dignity when criminal culpability for murder is established through due process. This much is the least required by the law of retribution; and killing is the closest approximation for justice in a case of willful murder. In any case, opposition to the death penalty perse doesn't constitute respect for human life; it is disrespect to it of the highest order. It is not inflicting the death penalty that cheapens human life, it is the attempt to outlaw it by taking it off the nation�s statutes book that threatens to render what they call the consistent ethic of life to become too cheap.

And, contrary to what opponents say, supporters of the death penalty are in reality not motivated by a desire for primitive revenge that enjoys the infliction of raw pitiless pain � as an end. More than even the desire for retribution, it is the need to experience a catharsis that will exorcise the effect of the overwhelming and consuming sadness occasioned by murder that motivates them. It is this catharsis that supporters of the death penalty seek; and it is what they get when the murderer is brought to book, tried under due process and executed. Certainly, every crime deserves punishment. Indeed, in the case of murder, you may not know the murderer; you may not know his victim; but you know that justice has been done. And equilibrium returns to the entire universe and to your being.

And if, as opponents of capital punishment assert, the administration of the death penalty is neither decent nor humane because condemned men are held for long periods in very horrible conditions, this has really nothing to do with death penalty itself. Thieves, burglars and even innocent persons can be subjected to this type of treatment; and it shouldn�t be a ground for campaigning against the punishment. Rather, questions of penal ineffectiveness and the maladministration of death penalty simply presents good case for the reform of detention centres and the employment of humane security personnel.

It is a sign of the times that the Western opposition to the death penalty is today no longer given in the form of an inevitable Darwinian evolutionary genetic fait accompli, or the usual, mostly discredited and perverted Freudian theories of unresolved and repressed sexual complexes. In the past the theories of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud had been used to enable people (and so criminals) escape responsibility for their action by ascribing all behaviour, especially compulsive criminal behaviour, to forces beyond human control. It is in universalizing these things that they are meeting obstacles.

And the real paradox of the times is that these very powers whose citizens, organisations and governments champion the cause of human rights and oppose the death penalty even for convicted criminals on account of it, are themselves engaged in killing innocent people all over the world. While the EU and the West promote this struggle against the death penalty, their armies are all over the place � in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Chechenya and in Palestine � killing the same human beings. We don�t see their conduct being guided by these sentiments they are promoting except when they are opposing our laws and values.

And, of course, if they were sincere in their abhorrence of killing human beings, in the wake of the World Trade Centre attack on September 11, 2001, they should have all somberly met in the US Congress and in the British Parliament to mourn the dead and bemoan the fact that killing is ineffective as a response and useless as a deterrent.

But instead of doing that we saw them going into these various countries in the name of a war on terror; and so far, they have killed so many people that they are up to this moment too ashamed to give the world the war's body count.

War is merely death penalty on a large scale, and for them it is always effective. Writing on the celebrated case of Timothy McVeigh in the National Journal, Stuart Taylor Jr. said, 'Timothy McVeigh is the ideal poster boy for the death penalty, it is often said. He is an unmistakably guilty, unrepentant, rational, calculating, confessed mass murderer who can complain neither of racism (he's white) nor of an unfair trial (he had good lawyers). If anyone ever deserved execution, he does. Even leading anti-death penalty scholar Hugo Adam Bedau has said, "I'll let the criminal justice system execute all the McVeighs they can capture.'"

And, no doubt, in the coming days they are going to capture many more murderers across the 36 states of the United States that still impose the death penalty. In the state of Texas alone 300 people have been executed since the US Supreme Court reauthorized capital punishment in 1976. Worldwide at least 100 countries have it on their statutes and they have no intention of outlawing it. And whatever one may say about the governments of these countries, their societies are the best in terms of upholding moral and religious values. And they are certainly better company than the murder and gay culture that the West is busy imposing on the world.
In addition, opponents of the death penalty say the punishment is terminal. Without doubt, it is. In the final analysis, everything in this world is terminal handed out by the courts. But this doesn�t make it any more unique than other sentences. The trial in respect of any other conviction could have also gone similarly wrong, and if the innocent convict died before retrial or redress this would have been just as terminal.

And, opponents of the death penalty have charged that it is ineffective as a deterrent. While the primary aim of death penalty is restitution, combating crime is an important second objective, and one shouldn�t be at the expense of the other. All the same, it ought to be palpable to those who are rational that even if it is true that as a punishment, the death penalty is not effective, it doesn�t mean the perpetrator of the crime is no longer culpable. Whether punishing him succeeds in reducing the incidents of similar crimes in future or not, the convict remains the convict. Ineffectiveness of sentence as a lesson will not discharge and acquit the guilty partry.

The answer therefore, is not to stop death penalty but to strengthen the criminal justice system so that mistakes are avoid. The question of ineffectiveness of death penalty is difficult to sustain. And just because armed robberies persist doesn't mean public execution is ineffective; rather it may perhaps have meant that without that punishment the rate of robberies will have quadrupled. Indeed, it can be argued that if punishment doesn�t reduce crime, how can licence do so? If penalty doesn't induce remorse in the perpetrator, or give appropriate lessons to survivors, how can letting culprits unpunished help matters or reduce future crime?

If confiscating stolen items from thieves doesn't stop other, or even these same, thieves from stealing it doesn't mean that we shouldn't confiscate, or that we should return, the stolen items to the thieves. That apparently is what the opponents of the death penalty are in effect alluding to by saying that we shouldn't kill those who kill because others will continue killing. This doesn�t make sense.

In enforcing the death penalty it is not unlikely that an innocent person may be killed, but that has nothing to do with the reality of culpability. The remedy is not to abolish the death penalty. The remedy is to have good lawyers, competent judges and an efficient criminal justice system.
Those who say the death penalty is degrading are not saying anything really, because every type of punishment is degrading, so to speak. So if the death penalty is unacceptable, why should life imprisonment be more acceptable? Afterall, we shouldn't demean human life by keeping it behind bars, can we? Life is not supposed to be spent in a cage.

Most of opposition to death penalty, in the final analysis, has a religious dimension to it. Actually an irreligious dimension. The main opposition to the death penalty, at least in the EU countries is said to have gone hand-in-hand with the decline in religious faith and the concept of an eternal life. No doubt, those who see this world as all there is to existence will take a different view of the death penalty from those who believe in a life after this.

In general punishment is meted out in order, if possible, to rehabilitate the offender or to guard society against the evil of the criminal. Penalties are also imposed in order to act as a deterrence to others planning to commit criminal acts; and, as noted, it also acts as retribution for the wrongs committed.

The society doesn�t owe any obligation to those who do not wish to be reformed; and those who take the life of others have clearly gone beyond the pale. And we must assert that there is nothing wrong with the death penalty or its imposition for the relevant offences.

The efforts underway to undermine the imposition of the death penalty must be defeated at all cost. There is nothing civilised about the struggle against the death penalty and there is nothing to be ashamed of in trying to uphold its necessity. This nation must be taught that something must remain beyond change; they are absolute. Justice is one of them. Others are evil: and murder is a good example of this category. We must pursue every murder until justice is done � whoever is involved. The law is of course about rights; but in our haste to appear modern by defending the rights of the accused we must remember that the victim is a human being with rights and all � and his case more deserving of the best of our efforts. While we accept that it is better to let a thousand murderers go free than kill an innocent person, this should not stop us from pursuing murderers, trying them, convicting them and putting them to death. We must demand catharsis from the world.

(source: Adamu Adamu, The Daily Trust) 14/08/03