Speaking at the UN Commission on Human Rights on item...

Speaking at the UN Commission on Human Rights on item 17, the promotion and protection of human rights, See Chak Mun said that since 1997 similar draft resolutions on the question of the death penalty had been submitted to the Commission calling for a moratorium with a view to abolishing the death penalty. The European Union had once again submitted this year an almost identical draft resolution with only slight revisions for updating purposes. From the point of view of streamlining and rationalizing the work of the Commission, was it purposeful for the Commission to adopt identically the same resolution year after year? It was not unreasonable to expect that once the Commission had adopted a draft resolution, even though not unanimously, there was no further need to take up the issue again? Mention had been made that the death penalty, imposed for whatever purpose was cited, conflicted with the very concept of human rights and human dignity. But that statement carried the assumption that for every capital punishment that was carried out, there had been a miscarriage of justice, and that innocents had been executed. Quite the contrary, for those capital punishments carried out under due process of law, few had been cited as a miscarriage of justice.