ARCHIVE · DOCUMENT
JULY 15, 2010PREFACE
by Sergio D’Elia
Secretary of Hands Off Cain
After 17 years of international initiatives against the death penalty, we are able to evaluate the success of Hands Off Cain’s “business” from its founding to the present. In terms of the cost-benefit ratio, there emerges the extraordinarily clear “productive” value of the “public offering” which we built in 1993, nurtured and made grow, a few humble artisans and some worker-ants, on a theory of deeds and people – “theory” also implies: series, connection, procession... – which we have strived to create and organize.
The value of the result obtained assumes greater importance when it is taken into consideration that Hands Off Cain has never employed more than seven full-time employees and that its average annual budget is around 200 thousand Euros, of which only 30 percent is spent on infrastructure and personnel, while the remaining 70 percent is destined exclusively for initiatives.
From a political point of view, the fact that spurred the founding of Hands Off Cain should also be considered. In the 90s, for the media and abolitionists worldwide, it seemed that the death penalty only existed in the United States and all those condemned to death were American. The abolitionist campaigns and “urgent actions” to attempt to save one or another condemned person were almost all in that direction, even if it constituted only a minor, though serious, part of the problem. Nothing, on the other hand, for the murderers – but also, often, those condemned for nonviolent acts, political crimes or crimes of conscience – held on the death rows of China, Iran, North Korea, Vietnam.
One of the merits of Hands Off Cain was certainly that it brought to light the other face of the death penalty, practised in authoritarian countries of which no one was aware or wanted to worry about, even as it represented almost the totality of the problem of the death penalty worldwide. And today it remains so, in view of the data in this report which shows that out of the 43 countries that maintain the death penalty, 36 are illiberal and in 18 of these there were at least 5,519 executions carried out in 2009, approximately 99 percent of the world total.
The success of 2007 at the United Nations of the Universal Moratorium on Executions may serve, above all, to confront this reality and give a voice, a face, dignity and hope to the “nameless”, to the “infamous” of the death penalty, unworthy of a newspaper article, an appeal, a sit-in, of an international campaign. Even though the definitive solution in many countries, more than the end to the death penalty, rests in establishing democracy and the rule of law, without which the sanctity of life is a mere petition of principle.
“The State may not dispose of the life of its citizens”, is the liberal principle on which we founded Hands Off Cain seventeen years ago, and the political significance, perhaps, most noteworthy of the vote at the United Nations in 2007, were the steps made in moving away from the nineteenth century principle of the absolute sovereignty of States. Between the supremacy of people, the sovereignty of the individual over themselves on one hand, and the supremacy of the State, the absolute sovereignty of the State over its citizens on the other, the United Nations, with the passage of that Resolution, chose to affirm the first and not the latter: the supremacy of people over that of the State.
However, it wasn’t just the success of the Moratorium at the United Nations, which capped off the conclusion of more than fifteen years of commitment on the part of Hands Off Cain and the Radical Party in working towards this objective at the international level. From 1993 to today, 55 countries have abandoned the practice of the death penalty, 17 of which have done so in the last three and a half years, that is, after the re-launching of the initiative at the United Nations. And the most significant events, in terms of abolition, have come to pass in parts of the world considered apparently immutable and inaccessible.
The States of New Jersey and New Mexico in the United States abolished the death penalty, where cases of abolition have not occurred in over forty years. Vietnam has eliminated the death penalty for eight crimes out of the twenty-nine for which the death penalty was prescribed. In China, capital sentences have decreased year by year to an overall drop of 30 percent, while the Supreme Court overturned 15 percent of the death sentences which it was called upon to review. In 2008, Pakistan’s Federal Government approved commutations of life imprisonment for approximately 7,000 prisoners and, in 2009, for the first time in the history of the country, no executions were carried out. The President of Kenya did the same thing for over 4,000 death row inmates and the President of Mongolia, beyond granting pardons to the condemned, also introduced a moratorium on capital executions.
These positive events are certainly not a prelude to the immediate abolition of the death penalty nor to radical changes in terms of democracy in many of these countries, but they are not empty facts in terms of human lives, considering that, for example, in Pakistan and Vietnam there were hundreds of executions just a few years ago and that in China, executions being counted in the thousands per year, a limited reduction can signify hundreds less executions.
The abolitions and the moratorium, both legal and de facto, of the last seventeen years are the equivalent of thousands less people shot, hanged and poisoned by lethal injection in the world. Now is the moment to double the effort and accelerate the process and Hands Off Cain has established two priority fronts, two objectives for its initiatives in meeting the request of the United Nations for a moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty.
The first is to abolish “State Secrets” concerning the death penalty, because many countries, mostly authoritarian, do not provide information on its application and the lack of information available concerning public opinion is a direct cause of higher numbers of executions. Towards this end, the Secretary General of the United Nations should institute the position of a special envoy, whose job it is, not only to monitor the situation and to push for increased transparency within the systems of capital punishment, but also to continue to persuade those who still maintain the death penalty to adopt the line of the United Nations.
The second is to spread the word of the Resolution throughout the world and organize political, legislative and public events in countries that still practice the death penalty. As Hands Off Cain, we are committed to moratorium projects throughout the world.
Starting with Africa, which is the continent where there is the largest number of de facto abolitionist countries and where, in recent years, there have been significant steps towards the abolition of the death penalty. Rwanda, Burundi and Togo completely eliminated the death penalty, and especially in the first two of these countries, abolition took on an extraordinary symbolic value, as well as legal and political value, being lands where, perhaps, the endless cycle of vengeance and the eternal drama of Cain and Abel was played out most truly and tragically.
In another two countries – Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo – Hands Off Cain has already held two conferences which were concluded with the onset of parliamentary procedures introducing bills for abolition. Another eight missions and two regional conferences are planned in the next two years of Hands Off Cain’s “Africa Project” financed in part by the European Union. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, in particular, the abolition of the death penalty would bring the country symbolic status, reflecting not only the martyrdom of Africa but also the continent’s capacity to heal its conflicts, embrace democracy and launch a message of nonviolence and tolerance.
The hard work begins now and our forces must be doubled to avoid that the success at the United Nations is consumed and undermined, and to achieve, through moratorium, the abolition of the death penalty throughout the world.