Would the Mikado approve?
Last week, the British Embassy to Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan posted an item on their website about students in Astana debating the Death Penalty today, the World Day against the Death Penalty. The event is to include a showing of the film “No to the Death Penalty!”.
The post gave some background statistics about the use of the death penalty in Kazakhstan; the last time the death penalty was carried out was in 2003 before the announcement of the moratorium. The last time a death sentence was imposed was in 2005, (but it still hasn’t been carried out due to the moratorium and the punishment has been replaced by life imprisonment, a sentence which was introduced in 2000).
Because it was about an event in Kazakhstan, the post didn’t contain any information about the situation in Kyrgyzstan.
Like all the countries from the former Soviet Union, Kyrgyzstan inherited a legal system in which the Capital Punishment was imposed to a variety of offences, and it continued to be imposed following independence. I’m not sure when the last execution actually took place, but it was before 1998 when the country imposed a moratorium on carrying out the sentence and in 2007 it was formally abolished. The 189 convicts who were on “Death Row” had their sentences commuted to one of Life Imprisonment. By 2009, when the subject erupted into the headlines once more, there were 204 prisoners serving life sentences.
The reason the subject “erupted into the headlines once more” was that the parliament refused to ratify the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which requires signatories to ban the use of capital punishment. Since Kyrgyzstan had already done so, signing up to the protocol should not have been a contentious issue. However, some members of the country’s Security Council argued that Kyrgyzstan “should not look to the West or the OSCE … It should introduce capital punishment for certain crimes. In some cases, executions should be held in public.” In his view, “this will help reduce the crime rate”.
This view gained “immediate” back from the prominent politician Adakhan Madumarov, (who is one of the front runners in the current Presidential Election), who was reported in the press as saying, “Why should society maintain people who have committed serious crimes against it? Even the United States, regarded as a model democracy, has three methods of capital punishment.”
Kurmanbek Bakiev, president at the time, distanced himself, and hence the Kyrgyz government, from these sentiments, but his supporters in the political party which controlled the parliament, Ak Jol, still voted as policy to refrain from signing the protocol, sending alarm bells ringing and was been seen by some analysts as reflecting a broader authoritarian impulse among the ruling elite.
It was suggested that the public comments were “a trial balloon to test public opinion”, and the resulting controversy did indeed start a public debate with comments from the ombudsman, politicians and leaders of the Human Rights organizations in the country: ” … public opinion is 80 or 90 per cent in favour of reinstatement”; “Any call for public executions, the practice in medieval times and under fascism, will push our country over into the abyss of lawlessness and obscurantism”; “irresponsible and reckless”; “ it would undermine Kyrgyzstan’s position in the international arena, above all in Europe”; “the experience of other countries clearly shows that having the death penalty does nothing to cut the crime rate” and ” … reinstating capital punishment is impossible, unless Kyrgyzstan wants to become a totalitarian state”. Human rights activists marked the World Day Against the Death Penalty by gathering in Bishkek to call for the right to life to be respected and for the penitentiary system to made more humane.
A few months later, however, on February 11th, 2010, the parliament took a decision to ratify the protocol. This was followed on March 16th with the adoption of a law giving effect to the decision, which the President signed and came into force when it was publiches in the government newspaper Erkin Too three days later, on March 19th.
And thus, Kyrgyzstan became the 73rd state to ratify the protocol and joined the countries which have formally abolished capital punishment. (Kazakhstan still has to do so – and, presumably, hence the debate in Astana.)
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For the record: Capital punishment, (the death penalty, or execution), is the term used to describe when a “sentence of death” is passed on a person by judicial process as a punishment for an offence. Crimes that can result in a death penalty are known as capital crimes or capital offences. (The term capital originates from the Latin capitalis, literally “regarding the head”, and hence a capital crime was originally one punished by severing the head from the body.)
Capital punishment has been used by most societies throughout history, (in Britain, for example, in 1820 there were 160 crimes that were punishable by death, including crimes such as shoplifting, petty theft, stealing cattle or cutting down trees in public place(!))
Incidentally, one notable exception was that of Kievan Rus – the original Russia which was fairly enlighted in some respects and tended to confine punishment for offences to the seizure of property, banishment, or, (more often), the payment of a fine. ”Even murder and other severe crimes (arson, organised horse thieving, robbery) were settled by monetary fines. Although the death penalty had been introduced by Vladimir the Great, it too was soon replaced by fines.”
Currently some 58 countries around the world still impose capital punishment; 96, (including Kyrgyzstan), have abolished it, whilst the others still have provisions for it in their legislation but haven’t used it in the recent past or allow its use only in extreme circumstances, (such as in wartime).
The UN moratorium on the death penalty was the result of two separate proposals put forward by Italy and Chile, (and supported by several countries and NGOs), to the General Assembly of the United Nations. It called for a general suspension of capital punishment throughout the world, not its abolition. It was affirmed in a committee on 15 November 2007, (by a vote of 99 to 52, with 33 abstentions), and then subsequently as Resolution 62/149 of the General Assembly on 18 December, (by a vote of 104 to 54 ). Then, on 18 December 2008, the General Assembly adopted another resolution (Resolution 63/168) reaffirming its previous call for a global moratorium (by a vote 106 to 46 with 34 abstentions).
The resolution called on those States that maintain the death penalty to establish a moratorium on its use with a view to its abolition and, in the meantime, to restrict the number of offences for which it imposed capital punishment and at the same time to respect the rights of those on “death row”. It also called on States that have already abolished the death penalty not to reintroduce it. However, like all General Assembly resolutions, it is not binding on any state.
In the European Union member states, Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits the use of capital punishment. In 2003, they organized the first such day and this year’s is the ninth occassion that the day has been marked. Since 2005, when more than 260 events took place, the World Day Against the Death Penalty has highlighted a particular theme each year. This year’s theme focuses on the inhumanity of the death penalty as a cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment; the conditions in which prisoners on “death row” are kept and the extreme psychological suffering involved and execution as a physical and mental assault.
You can find more details on their website.
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The title of this postcard is a reference to Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, The Mikado, in which the title character has a song which exemplifies the retributive theory of justice, (the Old Testament principle of “an eye for an eye”); to “let the punishment fit the crime“:
A more humane Mikado never
Did In Japan exist,
To nobody’s second,
I ‘m certainly reckoned
A true philanthropist.
It is my very humane endeavor
To make to some extent,
Each evil liver
A running river
Of harmless merriment.Chorus
My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time
To let the punishment fit the crime
The punishment fit the crime
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment,
Of Innocent merriment.Prosy dull society sinners
Who chatter and bleat and bore.
Are sent to hear sermons
From mystical Germans
Who preach from ten to four.
The amateur tenor, whose vocal
All desire to shirk,
Shall, during off- hours
Exhibit his powers
To Madame Tussaud’s wax-work.
The lady who dies a chemical yellow
Or stains her gray hair puce,
Or pinches her figure,
Is painted with vinegar*
And permanent walnut Juice.
The idiot who, in railway carriages,
Scribbles on window panes.
We only suffer
To ride on a buffer
!n parliamentary trains.Chorus
The advertising quack who wearies
With tales of countless cures.
His teeth I ‘v enacted,
Shall all be extracted
By terrified amateurs.
The music-hall singer attends a series
Of masses and fugues and ” ops ”
By Bach interwoven
With Spohr and Beethoven.
At classical Monday Pops.
The billiard sharp, whom any one catches,
His doom ‘s extremely hard
He’s made to dwell
In a dungeon cell
On a spot that’s always barred.
And there he plays extravagant matches
In fitless finger stalls
On a cloth untrue
With a twisted cue,
And elliptical billiard balls!
Chorus
(* The original libretto had “Is blacked like a nigger” … but please remember that this was in Victorian England when such usage was not uncommon and didn’t carry the same unsavoury connotations as it does today.)
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Bishkek