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POLITICS: New U.N. Chief Ambiguous on Death Penalty

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Jan 2 2007 (IPS) - As he walked into a group of waiting reporters on his first day at the United Nations, the newly-anointed Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon refused to express his personal views on the death penalty – in contrast to his predecessor Kofi Annan who publicly opposed capital punishment.

Asked whether the former Iraqi president, who was executed Saturday, should have been spared the death penalty, Ban said: “Saddam Hussein was responsible for committing heinous crimes and unspeakable atrocities against the Iraqi people. We should never forget the victims of his crimes.”

Still, Ban refused to clearly express his own views on capital punishment.

But his home country, South Korea, is one of the world’s few democracies supportive of the death penalty – along with the United States and Japan.

“The issue of capital punishment is for each and every member state to decide,” Ban told reporters Tuesday, holding his beliefs close to his chest.

At the United Nations, the 192-members have remained sharply divided over the issue: the 27-member European Union (EU) taking a strong stand against the death penalty while the United States, along with most or all of the 57 Islamic states, backing capital punishment.

Annan, who stepped down as secretary-general on Dec. 31, publicly opposed the death penalty. On principle, he was also opposed to the verdict of execution imposed on Saddam Hussein by the Iraqi courts last month, although he condemned the crimes committed by the Iraqi dictator.

“The forfeiture of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process,” Annan said.

“Let the states that still use the death penalty stay their hand, lest in time to come they look back with remorse, knowing it is too late to redeem their grievous mistake,” he pronounced.

Ban told reporters that he was “firmly against impunity”.

“I also hope that the members of the international community should pay due regard to all aspects of international humanitarian laws,” he said.

“During my entire tenure,” he reiterated, “I will try my best to help member states, the international community, to strengthen the rule of law.”

Asked whether there should be a moratorium on capital punishment, Ban repeated his earlier response: “I said that capital punishment, the death penalty, is the issue for each and every member state to decide. At the same time, I would hope that the international member states would pay due regard to all aspects of international humanitarian laws.”

On Sunday, Ashraf Qazi, the special representative of the secretary-general in Iraq, issued a statement pointing out that “the United Nations stands firmly against impunity, and understands the desire for justice felt by the many Iraqis.”

However, Qazi asserted, the “United Nations remains opposed to capital punishment, even in the case of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.”

Asked whether Qazi’s comments differed from that of Ban, U.N. spokeswoman Michele Montas told reporters the secretary-general’s reference to international humanitarian law “tacitly referred to how the United Nations and the U.N. Human Rights Council do not recognise capital punishment.”

She also asserted that Ban’s comments “were not a change in U.N. policy on capital punishment.”

The United Nations, she stressed, was not in favour of capital punishment but the secretary-general had indicated to reporters it was up to individual member states to decide.

Asked whether Saddam Hussein’s execution would help bring stability to Iraq, Ban said: “The Iraqi people and government have taken steps to address their past, and I hope that the international community should also understand the stakes and try to build the rule of law nationally and internationally.”

Meanwhile, the London-based Amnesty International (AI) said Sunday that it “totally opposes the use of the death penalty” and was concerned that the Iraqi Appeals Court had failed to address the major flaws during the former dictator’s trial before the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal which had rendered it unfair.

“We oppose the death penalty in all cases as a violation of the right to life and the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, but it is especially abhorrent when this most extreme penalty is imposed after an unfair trial,” said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.

AI also said that it is even more worrying that in this case, the execution appeared a foregone conclusion once the original verdict was pronounced, with the Appeals Court providing little more than a veneer of legitimacy for what was, in fact, a fundamentally flawed process.

AI also said it had “greatly welcomed the decision to hold Saddam Hussein to account for the crimes committed under his rule but this should have been done through a fair process.”

Hussein was sentenced to death last November after he was convicted of the killings of 148 people from al-Dujail village following an attempted assassination there in 1982.

Writing on the website CounterPunch, the London-based leftwing activist Tariq Ali says the fact that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant is beyond dispute.

“But what is conveniently forgotten is that most of his crimes were committed when he was a staunch ally of those who now occupy the country,” Ali noted.

It was, as he admitted in one of his trial outbursts, the approval of Washington (and the poison gas supplied by the former West Germany) that gave him the confidence to douse Halabja with chemicals in the midst of the Iran-Iraq war, Ali wrote.

“He deserved a proper trial and punishment in an independent Iraq. Not this. The double standards applied by the West never cease to astonish. Indonesia’s Suharto who presided over a mountain of corpses (at least a million to accept the lowest figure) was protected by Washington. He never annoyed them as much as Saddam.”

And what of those who have created the mess in Iraq today? asks Ali: “The torturers of (Iraqi prisoners in) Abu Ghraib; the pitiless butchers of Fallujah; the ethnic cleansers of Baghdad, the Kurdish prison boss who boasts that his model is Guantanamo?”

“Will (U.S. President George W.) Bush and (British Prime Minister Tony) Blair ever be tried for war crimes?”

Doubtful, predicts Ali.