More than 300 lawyers, NGOs, journalists, state officials, academics, activists, and others from around the globe galvanised efforts to end ‘an eye for an eye’ principle on justice system to abolish the application of capital punishment in Asia and elsewhere.
At the opening of the event on Thursday morning, NGOs and experts on the abolition of capital punishment from around the globe advocated that the application of death penalty is a violation of the most fundamental human rights, the right to life. It violates both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
About 300 lawyers, NGOs, journalists, state officials, academics, and activists joined the opening of the the Asian Regional Congress on the Death Penalty on 11-12 June 2015 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
One of the speakers of the opening ceremony, Chow Ying Ngeow, the Executive Committee of ADPAN, pointed out that in present although more than 70 per cent of countries around the world have abolished the death penalty, many Asian countries namely China, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, India, Indonesia, Thailand, or even Japan still implement death penalty on heavy criminal cases, such as terrorisms, murder, and drug trafficking.
Raphael Chenuil Hazan, the Executive Director of ECPM, said that two third of executions documented annually worldwide happened in Asia. He added that, in Southeast Asia, suspects convicted of drug trafficking constituted more than 50 per cent of those receiving death sentences in the region.
Earlier this year, the most populous ASEAN nation, Indonesia, executed 14 people most of whom were foreigners convicted of narcotic related cases.
Represented two young Australian suspects Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran of the notorious Bali Nine case, a drug trafficking case that rocked Indo-Australian relation, Julian McMahon, an Australian lawyer, who came to speak at the event said that his clients and many other in the same shoes should have been allowed a second chance.
“Both of them had reformed in prison,” McMahon said about the rehabilitation process of his former clients. “Myuran was selling his paintings to help other inmates in prison to raise money for [medical] operations.”
McMahon added that another victim from Brazil who was recently executed in Indonesia, Rodrigo Gularte, was in fact suffered from mental illness and that had the new evidences of his crime found after his execution been found earlier, Rodrigo would have been exempted from being killed by the firing squad.
When asked at the press conference if the abolition of death penalty is a form of cultural imperialism from the west, Macmahon said that in fact in the last couple of years the Indonesian government have been doing whatever it can to assist its citizens convicted to death sentence in other countries as well.
Posters chosen to display the message for the abolition of the death penalty at the event
“For me the application of the death penalty is a political move to divert something more important from public attention” McMahon criticised Joko Widodo’s, the Indonesian President, war on drug policy.
At the discussion on unfair trials at the event, Leon Chih-hau Huang, a lawyer from Taiwan who have represented many convicts on the death row, pointed out that people tend to be biased towards those who are pleasing to their eyes and play favoritisms without noticing it. Therefore, fair trials can sometimes be difficult to conduct.
Using the allegory from a famous novel ‘How to Kill a Mockingbird’, Huang asked “what if you can tell the mockingbird apart from the bluejay (the former symbolises the innocent and the later, the guilty, in the story).”
According to Saul Lehrfreund, a British attorney and Co-Executive Director of the Death Penalty Project in the UK, the fallacy of the justice system that might convict innocent people for crimes they did not commit persist everywhere.
“The risk of innocent people ended up being killed will never be totally eliminated because there can never be a perfect,” said Lehrfreund.
To illustrate his statement, Lehrfreund pointed to the case of Sean Hodgson, a British man who was wrongfully convicted of murdering a 22 years old woman in 1979 and was imprisoned for 27 years.
Chow Ying Ngeow, the Executive Committee of ADPAN, told Prachatai that in reality in cases related to drug trafficking people who were arrested and sentenced to death were mostly small people who did not know much about the heavy penalties on drug trafficking cases.
“It’s the small people who are being caught, but the big guys involved always manage to get away, so death penalty can never be effective in eradicating drug trafficking,” said Chow Ying.
On the fallacy of the legal system, she concluded that one person wrongfully convicted to death sentence is more than enough of a reason to abolish the death penalty.