Opinion, by Emma Bonino

My five years´ experience as Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, during which time I constantly had to deal with all the atrocities of our time - in the Balkans, Africa, Sri Lanka, Central America, etc. - confirmed my belief that no crime (no atrocity) can be canceled or even compensated for by another crime (by another atrocity) committed cold-bloodedly, and deliberately, in the name of the State. This opinion is shared by the jurists and politicians who, in drawing up the Treaty that established the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Rome last July, excluded the death penalty also for such crimes. I think this decision is an important step towards the definitive abolition of the death penalty from international law. A concrete example can be much more effective than entire awareness-raising campaigns. I am thinking of the one - prison - sentence handed down so far by the Tribunal in The Hague to the Bosnian Serb criminal Tadic. Yet Tadic´s crimes are far more serious than those committed by any of the 3,000 condemned prisoners in the United States or by the people who are hanged for fraud in China, for blasphemy in Afghanistan, for drug-trafficking in Saudi Arabia, and so on. In other words, to encourage people to take conscious action against the death penalty I think we, as individuals, must first take conscious action to protect ourselves and our dignity as human beings, because the application of the death penalty in the name of society makes us, as members of society, morally akin to the criminal we intend to punish. It is equally necessary to resist the temptation to divide the world into good and bad, to base our campaign on feelings rather than firm beliefs. Let me explain. I am often assailed by the images - still engraved on my memory - broadcast by the TV networks on that morning, in 1998, when the world was informed that Karla Faye Tucker had been executed at "The Wall" penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas. I see the gurney, and think about the lethal injection that - for the first time in a century - killed a woman in the name of the State; I see the face of Karla Faye Tucker, who was guilty, confessed to the crime, and was later sentenced to death and executed despite appeals for clemency that were sent to Texas from all over the world. Very few executions in recent years have resulted in such a large-scale mobilization of both the public and opinion makers; rarely has an execution provoked such a fierce protest against the death penalty outside the prison where it was carried out. I shall leave the experts of the mass media to analyze the meaning and the various aspects of the "Tucker Case." Here, I would simply like to express a thought on how this case affects us abolitionists and our campaign; a thought concerning the feelings that every State execution inevitably arouses in both abolitionists and those who still believe that the death penalty is a legitimate form of punishment. Strong, conflicting feelings that polarize and radicalize the debate. Profound human feelings that shift our attention from capital punishment itself to the character of the person put to death. Setting in motion an inevitable and highly emotive dynamic that results in the condemned prisoner being assigned the role of a positive and negative hero, in the sense that he is sanctified to some degree by the compassion and love of those who wish to save his life, and ruthlessly demonized by those who need monsters at all costs to show that State killing is a necessary expedient. I wonder if this emotional conflict does not actually make dialogue more difficult, does not actually widen the gap separating the two camps. I think it would be better to keep the fundamental issue - the death penalty - separate from other aspects of individual cases: such as the guilt or innocence of the condemned prisoner; the sympathy or aversion he may arouse. Haven´t we been taught that the criminal should not be identified with the crime? Isn´t this why we believe that the death penalty is unjust even if inflicted on the most inhuman butchers in the Former Yugoslavia, the most ferocious génocidaires in Rwanda? Isn´t this why we have drawn inspiration from a passage in the Bible for the motto and name of our association "Hands off Cain"? I am one of those people who think that America´s powerful democracy, which has been tempered also by its struggles for the development of civil rights and has shown that it considers liberty and human dignity to be precious values that must be protected, is a legacy to mankind. Well, when I hear so many Americans reiterate that the respect of liberty and dignity does not apply to those who are guilty of certain crimes, I tell them that, on the contrary, it applies even more. It is very easy to guarantee the rights of people who obey the law. But let´s not forget that once upon a time - not very long ago in fact - civil rights and liberty were not guaranteed to everyone in equal measure. Some people were excluded because of the color of their skin (recently in South Africa, less recently in America); some people are still excluded because of gender (Afghan and Saudi Arabian women), social origin, or other reasons. And if we take a look the situation on fundamental human rights, we realize that are still more areas where people are excluded. If human rights are common to all countries in the world and if the defense of these rights has led the International Community to establish its right-duty to "interfere" at a humanitarian level wherever grave violations take place, then we must consider capital punishment a crime against humanity that must be prevented. Some people may accuse me of being rhetorical, but I honestly believe that every person killed in a gas chamber or on an electric chair, by a firing squad or a hangman´s noose, is not merely a citizen of America, China, the Middle East, Africa, or another of the 72 countries that still apply the death penalty. That dead person is one of us, whose - still "legal" - killing offends us as deeply as the mass killings of Bosnians, Timorese, Rwandans and so on. No democratic State, not even the United States, can delude itself that it can "democratize" the death penalty; that there is any difference between death by lethal injection, inflicted in the name of democratic institutions, and death by hanging, inflicted by a dictatorship, such as China. We are dealing with exactly the same crime. This has been confirmed, for the fourth year running, by the UN Commission on Human Rights, in its defining the death penalty as a negation of human rights and, consequently, approving a resolution for the moratorium on executions. Of all the battles waged for human dignity the one to abolish the death penalty appeared to be - until a few years ago - one of the longest and hardest. Because there is a thin red line, which crosses borders and continents and runs through ideological choices and religious fanaticism, linking all those who still maintain that capital punishment is "necessary." However, we abolitionists are also bound by a common ideal, a common cause that gains converts in the four corners of the world. And we know we have found in the moratorium the right "weapon" to divide the bloc in favor of the gallows. The moratorium is actually a compromise, but a productive one. It is a meeting point between abolitionists and retentionists, because it allows abolitionists to make concessions to those who still provide for the death penalty in their laws and impose it; and retentionists to make concessions to those who have abolished the death penalty, by deciding to maintain it in their penal codes but not carry it out. The conquest of a new human right cannot be achieved with a colonialist culture, juridical prohibitionism, extremism or rigid ideology; nor can it be imposed by decree. It can only be achieved by establishing a common denominator through dialogue, through an exchange between diverse cultures and societies. As former UN Secretary-General Boutros Ghali said at the 1993 World Conference on Human rights in Vienna: "Human rights are the ´irreducible human element,´ in other words, the quintessential values through which we affirm together that we are a single human community." After its latest victory at the UN Commission on Human Rights, the European Union now has the task of reopening the dialogue with retentionist countries by re-presenting, more open-mindedly, the proposal for the global moratorium on executions at the General Assembly.