Bangkok Post, 10th October
To give a straight answer to a straight question, Thailand
is shuffling around rather than going anywhere on the death penalty. There has
been movement, the movement of holding meetings and asking opinions. There has
been progress, in recognizing the cogency of the world movement for abolition
and realizing that Thailand cannot just appeal to its particularity, claiming
that crime in our country is so prevalent and vicious that only the death
penalty can restrain it.
A recent booklet issued by the Department for the Defence of
Rights and Liberties of the Ministry of Justice, lists the incontrovertible
case, based on human rights principles, for abolition of capital punishment.
The right to life declared unequivocally in Article 3 of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and of Article 6 of the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights is now accepted as applicable to Thailand. This is a
big advance on earlier years where it was quibbled that the Universal
Declaration was not in fact obligatory, that the International Covenant allowed
capital punishment in the interim, and that the Covenant would have to be
incorporated into Thai law before it would become obligatory. The response of
Thailand to its responsibilities now lies in a detailed response to the
question posed above.
As the saying goes ‘there is an elephant in the room’ namely
a major obstacle to abolition, the elephant of public opinion. While individual
politicians may pander to public opinion and political parties introduce
populist policies to win approval, the polity of Thailand shows little true
regard for real public opinion. It is well known that Thais are massively in
favour of capital punishment and opposed to its abolition. Strangely, they
appear completely unaware that in practice, Thailand no longer executes people.
True, people are regularly condemned to death, at the rate of about one death
sentence a week, but that is the end of it. In the past ten years only two
people have been executed, an event which the Prime Minister of the day, in
answer to an enquiry by the Thai ambassador to the UN office in Geneva,
ascribed to a mistake. Condemned
prisoners evade the injection of poisons by commutation of sentence so that the
number condemned to death oscillates permanently around a total of 610.
The Department of Rights and Liberties has devoted all its
efforts to consulting audiences invited to meetings on their attitude to
abolition. I attended one such meeting where over a hundred persons gave their
opinion. The selection of persons appeared to consist mainly of government
officials or their contacts and was hardly a random sample. But they were
strongly adamant in their views, capital punishment was necessary, the crimes
subject to capital punishment should not be reduced, and the death penalty
should not be replaced by life imprisonment. There follow the statistics of
replies from five such meetings throughout the country:
“Mahidol University lecturer, Srisombat Chokprajakchat,
spoke at a seminar on the death penalty organized by the Justice Ministry’s
Rights and Liberties Protection Department on 8th August. She said that 41.4%
of people questioned in an opinion poll, conducted in four regions across the
country, believed capital punishment should be maintained while 7.8% held it
should be abandoned. The rest of 1073 respondents were undecided. The poll was conducted
by the university in conjunction with the government department. It was noted,
however, that fewer people supported the death penalty after learning more
about it she said. The university also conducted an online survey. It revealed
that of the
1, 301 respondents, who knew little about the death penalty,
73% supported it, while 4% wanted it abolished” Bangkok Post - 9 August 2014
Polls of this kind reveal the expected, and repeat the
experience of countries across the world, most of whom went on to abolish the
death penalty against the opinion of uninformed populations. These populations
later proved that the best argument against the death penalty is its abolition.
As people realize that the sky does not fall on them, and crime does not run
out of control under abolition, they come to appreciate the increased respect
for human life that ensues.
Not reported in the article quoted was the option of
replacing the death penalty by life imprisonment without parole (LWOP).
Imported from the US, this malign punishment leads to a need for new maximum
security prisons. Such prisons are unmanageable and lead to handing them over
to commercial companies who lack responsibility to the citizens subject to
meaningless imprisonment without hope in these black holes of human society.
LWOP was meant to replace a sentence of death, and is in fact a sentence of
death in another form to capital punishment by gallows, electric chair, gas
chamber, or lethal injection. LWOP is a sentence of waiting for death by
illness or old age; it mandates no escape from a prison cell other than as a
corpse.
Life imprisonment without parole makes meaningless the ideal
of imprisonment as a punishment leading to the reform and rehabilitation of
prisoners. In the words of one LWOP prisoner, “Most of my fellow prisoners
never receive a single visit, not from their families or friends. Instead they
live in a tortured twilight world between life and death. And this fate is not
reserved for a few super-criminals, mass murderers, of drug kingpins; it’s the
sentence of more than 50,000 men, women, and children. It is unprecedented too,
in the long course of human history, as nowhere in the past, and nowhere now in
the present, in any other country in the world, were or are people sentenced to
the rest of their lives in prison.”
There is a real danger that Thailand will slip into the
adoption of this appalling and meaningless punishment, proposed by an
irresponsible political non-leadership, to appease uninformed and unconscious
public opinion.
Danthong Breen, Director of Death Penalty Project, Union for
Civil Liberty (UCL)
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