Amnesty International lobbying T&T MPs to vote against bill to resume hangings

Amnesty International posted a new item on its official website Wednesday urging members of the Trinidad and Tobago Parliament to vote against a constitutional amendment bill which would allow executions to be resumed in the country.

The debate on the proposed bill begins on Friday and the Human Rights organisation wants MPs to reject the bill to protect rights.

"Trinidad and Tobago has a real problem with murder and violent crimes, but experience has shown that facilitating executions is not the solution," said Chiara Liguori, researcher on Trinidad and Tobago at Amnesty International in a statement posted on the group's website yesterday.

"Hurrying executions or ignoring appeals already in progress violates defendants' rights by denying them due process guaranteed under international law. The proposed bill would allow people to be executed even if they were appealing against their sentence, which is their right."

Liguori added, "We urge Parliament not to accept the proposed bill and instead tackle the root causes of violent crime and reform the police and justice systems. What may seem a technical change in the Constitution is in fact a matter of life and death for many people."

Amnesty claimed that more than 40 people are currently on death row in Trinidad and Tobago. The country is one of 93 countries in the world, which retains the death penalty. However no executions have taken place since 1999.

In 1984, the United Nations' Economic and Social Council said an execution should not be carried out if there was any appeal or recourse procedure pending on the case. The new bill would circumvent this principle and allow for expedited executions, Amnesty said.

Currently, under a ruling by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, acting as the highest court in the country, any execution carried out five years after the original sentence constitutes torture, which is illegal under the country's Constitution, it added.

Amnesty said the lengthy appeal process for death penalty cases means that, in practice, no executions are able to be carried out within the five-year period and most sentences have been commuted to prison terms.

It insisted that the proposed bill will ignore that ruling and make the Constitution inconsistent with human rights.

"We are extremely concerned that the new bill would allow for someone to be executed within a short period after a sentence is passed, not allowing for proper appeals and that others could be kept on death row for years on end," said Liguori.

However a local source who is familiar with the proposed legislation before Parliament told JYOTI Amnet International is distorting the facts about the bill.

"For one thing, the government is not proposing to violate the rights of any individuals by executing them while they have appeals pending. They are conveninetly mixing up the words "appeals" and "petition"," the source said

"The appeal is to the court and the petition is to the human rights body, which is not a court. Either way, the government is not proposing to hang people while their petitions are pending," he said.
 
"There are 32 persons on death row as at January 2011 - not OVER 40 as Amnesty International states.
 
"The Bill does not propose to circumvent the common law or international treaties but actually tries to ensure that the appeals and petitions processes are done in keeping with the deadlines set by the common law judgments," the legal source said.