The resolution adopted on Dec 19, 2016 was backed by 117 states, while 40 voted against it and 31 abstained.
24 of the OIC’s 57 member states voted in favour of the moratorium, while 13 abstained and only 18 voted against. The Muslim states that voted against were: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Egypt, Guyana, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Those who abstained included: Bahrain, Cameroon, Comoros, Djibouti, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Uganda and the UAE.
The love of hanging
PAKISTAN
chose to vote against the recent resolution in the United Nations
General Assembly that had called for a global moratorium on the death
penalty and was adopted by a majority of member-states.
The
gist of this resolution has been adopted by the UN General Assembly
every two years since 2007.
The resolution adopted on Dec 19, 2016 was
backed by 117 states, while 40 voted against it and 31 abstained. As
against the voting pattern in 2014, the new supporters of the moratorium
call were Guinea, Malawi, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka and Swaziland.
South
Asia maintained its fondness for the death penalty as Pakistan joined
Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India and Maldives in rejecting a universal
moratorium, while Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka voted in favour.
Pakistani authorities have an aversion to any scrutiny of the rationale for retaining the death penalty.
Those
who defend the death penalty as a principle enjoined by Islam may look
at the division among the Muslim states (the category includes all
members of the OIC).
Those voting in favour of a
moratorium included: Albania, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Benin, Bosnia
Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Eritrea, Gabon, Guinea,
Guinea Bissau, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Mali, Mozambique, Sierra Leone,
Somalia, Suriname, Togo, Tajikistan, Tunisia, Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan.
Those who abstained included: Bahrain,
Cameroon, Comoros, Djibouti, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania,
Morocco, Niger, Nigeria, Uganda and the UAE.
The Muslim
states that voted against were: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Egypt,
Guyana, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Oman, Pakistan,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
We find that
24 of the OIC’s 57 member states voted in favour of the moratorium,
while 13 abstained and only 18 voted against. In other words, Pakistan
is in the minority group of 18 OIC member-countries that opposes the
moratorium.
It is for Pakistan’s government and its
Islamic scholars to ponder as to why a majority of the OIC members do
not find any faith-based bar to the acceptance of a moratorium on
capital punishment. They may also consider the possibility that, as in
the case of some international treaties, reservations expressed in the
name of religion are in fact dictated by the culture or custom of the
countries concerned.
What is more distressing for human
rights activists, abolitionist groups and promoters of humanitarian laws
in Pakistan is the authorities’ aversion to any scrutiny of the
rationale for their love of the death penalty regime.
What
one hears of references to the death penalty during the Universal
Periodic Review or at talks with the European Union on the GSP+ status
is not the result of any serious deliberation. Indeed, one doubts if any
discussion on the subject has ever taken place in Pakistan. That there
is an urgent need for such a discussion can easily be established.
The
recent cases in which the Supreme Court acquitted two individuals who
had already been executed, or ordered the release of persons who had
spent long years on death row, have strengthened the call for abolition
of the death penalty on the ground of high risk of miscarriage of
justice. A number of other issues that have surfaced over the past many
years also need to be addressed. These are:
• The view
that the death sentence is not a deterrent to crime has not been
challenged nor has the view that hangings brutalise society.
•
The Qisas law has prevented the president from pardoning death convicts
or commuting their sentence although his power to do so under Article
45 of the Constitution remains intact. How does one explain the fact
that the army chief can pardon a person awarded the death sentence by a
military court while the president cannot do so?
• The
scholars agree that Islam prescribes the death penalty in only two
instances. How does the state defend the fact that capital punishment is
prescribed for 27 offences in the name of religion?
•
The judiciary has pointed out the problems it faces in cases in which
capital punishment is mandatory if the evidence on record warrants a
lesser penalty.
• The possibility of a minor or a mentally challenged person being executed keeps cropping up every now and then.
One ventures to suggest a look at the Indian response to the issue of the death penalty in view of the shared legal tradition.
The
Law Commission of India recommended in August 2015, vide its Report No.
262, that “the death penalty be abolished for all crimes other than
terrorism-related offences and waging war”. The commission agreed to
retain capital punishment for certain offences in view of the
parliamentarians’ plea that “abolition of death penalty for
terrorism-related offences and waging war will affect national
security”, although in the commission’s view “there is no valid
penological justification for treating terrorism differently from other
crimes.”
The commission noted the significant steps taken
during India’s decades-long efforts to restrict the use of the death
penalty: removal of the requirement of giving special reasons for
awarding life imprisonment instead of death (1955); introduction of the
requirement of imposing the death penalty (1973); and the Supreme
Court’s decision that the death penalty should be restricted to
the rarest of rare cases (1980). The conclusion reached by the
commission was:
“Informed also by the expanded and
deepened contents and horizons of the right to life and strengthened due
process requirements in the interactions between the state and the
individual, prevailing standards of constitutional morality and human
dignity, the commission feels that time has come for India to move
towards abolition of the death penalty.”
During the
latest debate in the UN General Assembly, however, India again voted
against the resolution calling for a moratorium although it could have
shown some respect for the Law Commission’s recommendation by
abstaining. Which only goes to show that, in developing countries, state
policies are often determined by authorities that are too timid to
disturb the status quo or too proud of their conservatism to heed the
counsel of experts who are conscious of the call of the age.
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