THE DEATH PENALTY and  HUMAN RIGHTS

As with most murders of a particularly horrendous nature the case of Axel Rudakubana has resurrected  the call for the restoration of the death penalty.

For the record, capital punishment for murder was abolished in the UK in 1969 but it was not until 1999 when the UK signed the  6th Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights that the death penalty was automatically abolished for those remaining crimes which still carried it, namely: piracy with violence, treason and  mutiny in military service.

Despite numerous calls that the UK should renounce the Convention and thus be able to  re-instate capital punishment it really isn't that simple.

The Convention was a direct response to the human rights violations perpetrated by Germany during the Second World War and in 1948 politicians including Winston Churchill, academics, business leaders, trade unionists, and religious leaders convened the Congress of Europe, at the end of which the Congress, issued a declaration pledging to create a Convention on Human Rights .

The British MP and lawyer Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe was one of the principal architects of the Convention, so given that the it was the United Kingdom that pushed for the creation of a Council of Europe, a European Convention on Human Rights and a court, the European Court of Human Rights to enforce it, and that the Convention was based on the 1689 English Bill of Rights, for the UK to renounce the Convention would be an act of momentous hypocrisy. It would be equivalent to saying that it (the Convention) should apply to all those (semi-civilised) Europeans but that Great Britain was above such considerations.

 When capital punishment was abolished it was replaced, in the case of murder, with an obligatory sentence of life imprisonment.

There is little doubt that the mass of the general public, strongly opposed to the abolition, thought that this meant murderers would be kept in jail for the rest of their lives, but in this they were to be swiftly disappointed.

 In the majority of cases throughout the1960s and right up to2006 the average time served in prison for murder was between 10 and 15  years and it was not until 2003 that the sentencing judge was able to set a minimum time that must be served in prison for a life sentence, and was also able to order that for certain specific crimes the sentence could be  what is known as a "whole life order" where the prisoner can never be released and must die in jail, a power exercised by the Home Secretary until 2000.

 Even in the extreme unlikelihood of the UK revoking the European Convention on Human Rights capital punishment would still be illegal until restored by Act of Parliament. Given that it was Parliament, not a general public consensus, that abolished capital punishment in 1969, 30 years before we signed the 6th Protocol of the Convention, and that Parliament has consistently refused any call to reinstate the death penalty, the chance of any such restoration is not a realistic possibility.

However, there is another consideration on the whole debate that surrounds capital punishment,  that of which is the most humane way of dealing with those which commit the most serious of crimes.
Is it humane, within the broader definition of the term, to incarcerate an 18 year old, in the case of such as Axel Rudakubana, for 52 years?

He will not be eligible for parole until he is 60, at a time in the future which will be so far removed from the world he knew as to be unrecognisable, it would be like being transported to a different world, a world as alien to him as life on Mars.

Is a swift, painless execution a more humane way of dealing with such criminals?

When a dog no longer has any 'quality of life' he is put painlessly to sleep and Parliament is now debating just such an alternative to  those humans suffering from an incurable illness, the so-called 'right to choose'.

So it is inhumane to keep a suffering dog alive and may soon be possible for a terminally ill human to end his or her own life, on the basis that it is cruel and inhumane to allow them to suffer needlessly, but it will still be perfectly acceptable to incarcerate someone for 50 or more years, until they either die within those stone walls, or become so divorced from life outside that they must remain there until death resolves their condition.

One wonders, faced with such a life, how many would choose execution, as did  Gary Gilmore, executed at his own request by firing squad on January 17, 1977.