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Rights activist lawyers’ forum to help steer death abolition campaign
WSN Network

ROME: Lawyers for Human Rights International, an activist body of lawyers fighting on human rights front and proactive in the campaign to abolish death penalty, has been elected on the steering committee of World Coalition Against Death Penalty. The World Coalition’s General Assembly meeting was held in Rome on June 13. The forum comprises 88 international NGOs , Bar Associations, Trade Unions etc and aims at strengthening the international dimension of the fight against the death penalty.

Its main activities are the World Day against the Death Penalty, which will focus on teaching abolition in 2009, a ratification campaign for the United Nations Protocol to Abolish the Death Penalty and a campaign for a universal moratorium on executions.

Lawyers For Human Rights International is actively involved in the campaign since last many years as it has been proven beyond doubt through studies and empirical data that in the countries or areas where the death penalty has been frequently used as a punishment, it has had no deterrent effect on crime rate.

Instead, in places where death penalty has been abolished or is not being carried out, the crime rate has decreased rather than increasing.

For a considerable time now, the activism’s focus area have been the six countries that include India, Japan and Pakistan. China was not chosen as a targeted country despite the huge number of executions carried out each year because it was already the target of a specific campaign focusing on China in the view of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. This campaign started in January 2008 and ended in July 2008 with the symbolic handover of the petitions to the Chinese authorities following a press conference in Hong Kong.

In India, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was ratified in 1979 but in the United Nation General Assembly Resolutions 62/149 and 63/168 for a moratorium on the death penalty, India voted against but did not sign the statement of dissociation initiated by Singapore5.

At independence in 1947, India retained the 1861 Penal Code which provided for the death penalty for murder

1 July 2009
 

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