Killing in the Name of the Law: Why Capital Punishment Violates the Foundations of Human Rights -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

It is a contradiction that many governments put people on trial for execution even as they boast of legality. Among all the violations in today’s human rights system, perhaps this is one which should most concern us. Governments talk about dignity, justice, and the rule of law. But they insist on holding this particular power over the lives of their citizens. Capital punishment for serious crimes is often validated as the court ordered outcome of lawful offenses. But in truth, under a regime of law and violence, man’s capacity for justice has its limits. It shows how frail can be the supporting underpinnings of human rights when a state persists in breaking the laws that it itself has held sacred. The foundation of international human rights law is the recognition that everyone has the right to live.

It is not something which governments give, or can take away when they please. The death penalty is allowed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights only under very stringent conditions. Abolitionist trends worldwide follow a growing recognition that those conditions cannot prevent an unjust verdict with capital punishment if a person is innocent. No legal system is free from risk of error. Courts make mistakes, witnesses lie, evidence is mishandled and confessions sometimes are gained by coercion. When error is discovered in a conviction, the case can be re heard. When justice executes an incorrect verdict turned out, this becomes permanent. Those who advocate the death penalty will argue that it is reserved for a particular offense of gravity. This question however concerns not just how serious the crime was or might be, but whether a state should hold such authority. If human rights are to mean anything, they have to establish limits that even the mightiest government cannot traverse. Allowing a state to take life itself as punishment sets an alarming precedent. For this suggests that government by institutions which are themselves imperfect, susceptible to politics, racism or prejudice and influenced by public opinion can dictate the value of human existence. How death sentences are carried out globally is another contradiction of essential human rights principles: The punishment incongruously falls heavily upon poor people, the politically disenfranchised, racial minorities, and nationals who lack sufficient legal defenses. Properly qualified legal advice may decide whether a person lives or dies. Justice based on wealth, nationality or social standing is not justice. It is the most extreme form of persecution.

Lack of transparency is another major concern. In several countries information about death sentences and executions is considered a state secret. Families are not notified, lawyers are refused access, and the public is kept in the dark. A punishment that cannot stand up to public scrutiny should not exist in a system which purports to be just. Secrecy entrenches abuses, perpetuates mistakes, and makes possible the taking of irreversible decisions without any possibility of review.Returning to the question of death penalty as justice in itself, the problem lies deeper than certain judicial flaws. The ban on cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment is a cornerstone of international human rights law. Regardless of the means, carrying out the death sentence is in the final analysis a stripping away of human dignity.

What this does is turn justice into reprisal and the government into a fulfillment of deliberate murder. A government which shows no respect for life, in subordinate to that lethal one possesses an ironic affirms of governance. Far from defending life, a government able to justify the deliberate taking of life cannot claim to be for life. Cleary, the death penalty is not necessary to maintain law and order; indeed, abolition is not only possible but an irrevocable step towards greater civilisation and society. Many countries that abolish the death penalty find no corresponding increase in serious crime. Instead, the concept of justice itself changes. Modern legal codes insist on the human dignity of punishment, even when the crime is most profound. The vigor of the rule of law should be judged not by harshly it punishes but rather how firmly it adheres to some basic principles. The universal call for a suspension on executions does not amount to leniency towards crime. It recognises that any irretrievable act of judicial punishment cannot coexist with a system of justice that is fallible itself. The more powerful a government, the more obligated it is to restrain itself. By insisting upon preservation of the death penalty as required criteria in these circumstances, a government is not defending law; it is defending an exercise of power that puts human rights beneath capital punishment. If the World is not to long and in words but to remain true the rights which these words embody, then it must take that there is a simple truth. This is that no point of lawfulness can legitimize capital punishment.