Jamaican Prime Minister P

Jamaican Prime Minister P.J. Patterson criticized Britain's Privy Council for a decision to halt executions in some Caribbean nations, saying the move was part of a plan to abolish capital punishment in the region.
The Privy Council, which serves as the final appellate court for Jamaica and other former British colonies in the Caribbean, ruled on March 11 that a mandatory death sentence for murder constituted inhuman and degrading punishment and was therefore unlawful.
"The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council is determined to make it impossible, by virtue of its ruling, to carry out the death penalty in accordance with the legislative authority of our sovereign parliaments," Patterson was quoted by the Jamaica Observer as saying.
The ruling, hailed by Amnesty International and other anti-death penalty groups, had the effect of striking down capital punishment in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, Belize, and Antigua and Barbuda, anti-death penalty campaigners said.
Britain has been trying to persuade its former Caribbean colonies for years to drop the death penalty. But public opinion polls consistently showed that capital punishment had widespread support in the Caribbean as a deterrent to rising violent crime.
Many Jamaican murder convicts have cases before the Privy Council, which is now almost certain to rule that they should not be hanged.