| By Rabindra RooplallHaving made the commitment to the United Nations two years ago, the Guyana Government is still to abolish the nation’s death penalty laws.Guyana’s human rights record was reviewed and examined yesterday by the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) Working Group for the second time. Guyana was one of the 14 States to be reviewed in Geneva,Cheap Basketball Jerseys, Switzerland.Guyana’s delegation was headed by Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, Minister of Foreign Affairs. Presidential Adviser Gail Teixeira should have been part of the delegation, but the storm that blanketed the eastern seaboard prevented her from travelling on to Switzerland.Among the recommendations that were still to be taken on board were the abolition of the death penalty and of discriminatory laws against gays and lesbians.The number of countries executing prisoners is declining but even so thousands remain on death row, often in appalling conditions and without access to legal services. The death penalty has no place in the 21st century, according to the United Nations (UN).Only 50 of the 193 UN Member States are considered to be retentionist. The remainder have either abolished or introduced a moratorium on the death penalty.Despite the advances, it is however, estimated that more than 18,000 people globally are on death row and the figure may be much higher.Capital punishment remains on the books in Guyana, even though it has been obsolete for all practical purposes for more than 15 years.As part of its drive to support the UN in its advocacy for abolition of the death penalty, the UN Human Rights Office had organized a series of global discussions on the subject. A survey found that there is no proof that the death penalty is an effective deterrent.Research consistently shows that the best deterrent to serious crimes lies in ensuring that criminals face a high chance of capture and punishment within a reasonable time. The certainty of punishment, rather than its severity, deters criminals.According to the UN, Member States need to move towards the abolition of the death penalty and where the procedure is still practiced to increase transparency around the application of the death penalty and to allow for a serious debate on utility of capital punishment.The UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR) has mandated Guyana to review its laws and abolish the death penalty. Several other countries in the Caribbean Community (Caricom) must do the same. Guyana has approximately 30 persons on death row.Even though Caricom countries still retain the death sentence, only Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago have utilised death sentences in recent years, the last being in 2012. But there have been no executions for some time in Caricom.By the time the world celebrates the 67th anniversary of the UN’s adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on World Human Rights Day on December 10, the tide would have turned irreversibly in the long battle against the death penalty, an inherently cruel and deeply flawed punishment that has done incalculable damage to countless individual lives and whole societies. However, Guyana is now on the trajectory of abolishing the death penalty.Experience and evidence demonstrate that the death penalty is cruel, irrevocable and a violation of the right to life. It damages and poisons society by endorsing violence, and by causing injustice and suffering. It has no particular deterrent effect on violent crime, and in fact, abolitionist nations often have lower murder rates than those that still execute.Increasingly, the world’s community of nations is sending a clear, collective and powerful political message that there is no place for capital punishment in humanity’s future.Guyana must not be one of the last countries to ban judicial death penalties.The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has convened a series of important global panel events on the death penalty, focusing on wrongful convictions, deterrence and public opinion, and discrimination. Specifically, discriminatory practices in the imposition of the death penalty further reinforce the calls for its universal abolition. |
