September 17-19, 2003: an HOC delegation made up of...

September 17-19, 2003: an HOC delegation made up of Italian MP Enrico Buemi, MEP Marco Cappato, Regional Counsellor for Lombardy (Italy) Alessandro Litta Modignani and HOC Board Member Anna Zammit, visited Sri Lanka to lobby for support of a worldwide moratorium on executions through a UN General Assembly resolution and for fact-finding on the current death penalty situation in the Asian country.In 2003, HOC's daily news monitoring of the death penalty situation worldwide picked up alarming reports of a possible resumption of executions in Sri Lanka, where the last hanging took place in 1976. Local authorities that received the delegation said rising crime had prompted the government to propose bringing back hanging. The gallows in Colombo's Welikada prison, the island's largest, were restored for use earlier in 2003, with the Commissioner of Prisons, Rumy Marzook, who met the delegation on September 17, confirming that the prisons department had bought the necessary ropes for executions. The department employs two hangmen. The delegation was permitted to visit death row and see the place of execution accompanied by the Assistant Commissioner of Prisons Asoka Hapuarachchi. The gallows has three hooks, allowing three people to be executed at a time and is activated over a trap-door. It is situated right inside the prison's death row that houses around forty men in very poor conditions. Biranasinghat, whose cell is rights next door to the gallows has finished all his appeals against his conviction for the murder of a 13-year-old girl. Asked how he feels about the gallows behind the locked iron door next to his iron-barred cell, he replied that he was sorry for the other people on death row as well, and seemed more concerned that his family - who are very poor and whose house was burnt down by neighbours in vengeance for his crime - do not have the means to come and visit him. Another inmate the delegation spoke to, a former army officer who did not identify himself, but saluted the prison officials and addressed us politely whilst standing up straight, said he had been convicted for "accidentally killing a person." Asked about his feelings on being on death row he said he had only been there three weeks and he was not yet quite conscious of the real possibility of being hanged. Sri Lanka's Welikada death row is one of the two in the country - an unspecified number of inmates are held in a jail in Kandy, prison officials told us.The rest of the jail was terribly overcrowded and the poor living conditions were in stark contrast to the female prison nearby. The women's jail has a children's ward - whose youngest inmate at the time of the HOC delegation's visit on September 17 was a nine-day-old girl - and provides a drug rehabilitation programme, and English, dance and handcraft classes. Sabaradna Saharatnam, who was appealing her conviction under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, told us that the prison has a drug and homosexuality problem. Prison officials told us they try to deal with the latter by housing younger girls in the secure ward, despite the fact that the majority of the 20 inmates there were in for minor offences such as trying to travel on fake passports. There are no women on death row in Sri Lanka. Prisoners whose death sentences have been confirmed can have their sentences commuted by the President, a practice that has been followed in the country by various governments since 1976. Despite a recent declaration by the Interior Minister John Amaratunga that the country needs to be ready to resume executions at any time, there are no pending executions. The signing of death warrants is at the discretion of the President, but the Attorney General, the Justice Minister and the trial judge have to give their unanimous consent for an execution to go ahead.