الاجتماع الرفيع المستوى بشأن القيادة ونبذ عقوبة الإعدام – الدورة التاسعة والستون للجمعية العامة

New York, 25 September 2014

Ladies and gentlemen,

In 1931, George Orwell famously described a hanging – you all know this. As the condemned man was marched, in handcuffs, to the gallows, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle – an ordinary, tender, very human gesture. Orwell wrote, and I quote, “Till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man… the unspeakable wrongness.”

What Orwell understood so well was how human reason, tugged by the presence of one puddle placed inconveniently in the path of a man about to die, demanded a more complex human response. What he saw was fundamentally a form of revenge. And revenge, however dressed up it was by a judicial process, still remained a crude act of state vengeance. And with 8000 years of practice behind it, drawn from the belief that life, even though not created by society, can nevertheless be withdrawn by it, the urge for vengeance had, to Orwell, separated humanity from its own, very necessary, sense of decency. Worse still, the very word “revenge” itself had become so distorted, it was, and still is -- alas to too many -- synonymous with justice.

Even today, almost all criminal codes, whether derived from the common or civil law traditions, or both, are judicial algorithms hinged principally on retribution, or punishing the guilty. Yes, the revelation of the truth is also an elevated objective but make no mistake, it is the punitive consequence that is prized greatest.

But punishment alone is not justice. For justice to be served to the wrongdoer, or served up to the wronged party -- the victim -- it requires not just retribution, but a genuine recognition by the wrongdoers of their wrongdoing. It requires genuine remorse, and reckoning. We are still far from reaching that point. But we must nevertheless set course toward it, be more sophisticated, more human. As we work toward that objective, enabling genuine contrition, we must continue to put an end to the application of the death penalty, which is the very example of human vengeance at its worst. It may bring a primordial sense of relief to the victims; but they are still often shortchanged in the absence of genuine remorse by the wrongdoer.

The practice of putting to death someone is, therefore, degrading and cruel in more than one sense. And, in practice, it is often discriminatory in respect of the condemned. The poor, the mentally ill, the powerless and people from minorities are disproportionate among those executed. In several States, the death penalty is still used for offences that do not meet the threshold of “most serious crimes,” and follows trials that clearly violate human rights standards for fair trials. No judiciary, anywhere in the world, is so robust that it can guarantee that innocent life will not be taken, and there is an alarming body of evidence to indicate that even well-functioning legal systems have sentenced to death men and women who were subsequently proven innocent. This is intolerable.

As I take up my post as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, I am impressed and heartened by the strong momentum we are seeing towards ending the application of the death penalty. Most recently, Equatorial Guinea, Pakistan, and the States of Washington, Maryland and Connecticut in the United States have decided to either establish a moratorium or to suspend executions. China has reduced the number of offences for which the death penalty is imposed. And in April this year, El Salvador, Gabon and Poland acceded to the Second Optional Protocol to International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty.

These decisions to cease judicially sanctioned killings have been taken thanks to principled political leadership, exhibited by leaders such as the Heads of State who join us on the podium today. It is an honour to be among people who have had the courage and the principles to confront domestic political opposition.

In countries that continue to put people to death, we often hear that public opinion supports the death penalty. But there may have been countries in which slavery had popular support; that did not make it right. As leaders, we can help to shape public opinion. We can advocate for national debates on the death penalty that are not moored in disinformation and fear. We can debunk the myth of deterrence by highlighting research and facts. And we can highlight the very real probability that death sentences will kill innocent people.
These themes are captured in my Office’s new publication on the human rights dimensions of the application of the death penalty, Moving Away from the Death Penalty, Arguments, Trends and Perspectives.

I take this opportunity to urge those States that continue to apply the death penalty to increase their technical cooperation with my Office. We can offer assistance with regard to possible ways to abolish the application of the death penalty, including the creations of fora in which State authorities, jurists, civil society organisations, scholars and practitioners can present convincing arguments in favour of abolition. We can also support legislative reforms to narrow the types of offences eligible for the death penalty, in accordance with international human rights law, as a first step towards an end to application of the death penalty.

Excellencies,

As Bertolt Brecht revealed to us in his celebrated play Mother Courage, killing is killing, its lawfulness governed only by the strange circumstances in which the killing takes place. Eilif, a soldier at war, kills and is a hero. And he continues killing -- but now the war has ended, the circumstances have changed; he does not know this, and is considered a murderer, a criminal. The conduct, the killing, did not change, only the conditions changed and our definition of what is killing.

The death penalty is too severe a sanction in the hands of humans, who are not capable of applying it free of mistake. It is too filled with vengeance, too incomplete in providing relief to the victims, and is little other than a supreme example of, and claim to, human primitiveness. Surely, we cannot reach far into the 21st century, claim to be an ever more sophisticated humanity, and still be practicing it. Its application must now be suspended by all states.

Thank you.