Strasbourg Hosts Anti-Death Penalty Congress
More than 100 state prosecutors, lawyers and campaigners from South Africa, the United States, Japan and Europe will meet here to discuss strategies aimed at achieving a global moratorium on capital punishment. The three-day conference staged at the Council of Europe premises begins on Thursday June 21.
The French human rights organization "Ensemble Contre la Peine de Mort" ECPM (together against the death penalty) is organizing the congress with the support of the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, the German Bundestag and parliamentary assemblies in France, Italy, Austria, Portugal and Belgium.
International organizations such as Amnesty International and the International Federation of Human Rights are also involved.
"More than half the world's countries have already abolished the death penalty, opposing it is part of the globalization of human rights," said ECPM president, the writer Michel Taube.
Taube regards America and China as unfortunate exceptions, saying the road to universal abolition was being especially impeded by the U.S., the last big democracy to use capital punishment massively.
In the U.S., alone more than 700 people have been executed since 1977 including some convicts who were mentally handicapped at the time their crimes were committed.
On Tuesday confessed murderer and drug trafficker Juan Raul Garza was put to death at a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana on the same gurney where McVeigh's death came last week after a lethal cocktail of chemicals was injected into his veins.
Before McVeigh's death, the United States had not executed a federal prisoner in 38 years.
The second federal execution in just more than a week added to the renewed national debate over the death penalty, which has come under increased legal scrutiny in recent weeks.
The U.S. Congress in 1994 passed a law allowing the death penalty to be imposed for violent crime convictions in conjunction with drug- trafficking penalties.
The Supreme Court said earlier this month that it would reexamine the issue of mentally retarded criminals who face the death penalty.
Taube believes there are hopeful signs in the campaign to repeal the death penalty around the world. Since 1995 another 24 countries have scrapped capital punishment, among them Spain, Poland, Belgium, South Africa, Bulgaria and Ukraine. In other countries like Russia, Armenia or Turkey there is a moratorium on the death penalty which means the punishment is still on the statute books but is no longer applied.
In his welcome address to the Congress German Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse said the death penalty was "in principle and application a barbaric act unworthy of a civilized society."
It contravened the most basic of all human rights, namely the right to life itself. "A civilized state cannot tolerate injury to the dignity and physical integrity of any person," said Thierse who said he wanted to see the death penalty scrapped worldwide as quickly as possible.