NGOs to push US on death penalty moratorium

When the Human Rights Committee called on the United States last month to place a moratorium on the death penalty because it is imposed disproportionately on minorities and the poor, the Bush administration curtly ignored the recommendation. Human rights organizations, however, have not; they are promising instead to keep up pressure. "This helps us point out that the US is increasingly isolated," David Elliot, chief communications officer of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty told IPS in a telephone interview from Washington, DC. "It is very important for Americans to understand we are one of very few industrialized countries that still have the death penalty." The demand for an immediate moratorium on capital punishment came during a review of US compliance with a human rights treaty known as the International Convention of Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). The review, which ended in July in Geneva, is a routine procedure that is supposed to occur every four years. This time it was more than seven years late due to the US State Department's delay in submitting its own official report, the ICCPR said. The committee recommendations on the death penalty were overshadowed by other aspects of the report, which included strong criticism over the treatment of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, torture of prisoners, Bush administration policies of rendition and charges of spying on domestic citizens. The treaty monitoring committee also expressed concern over racial disparities and the treatment of gays in the US. In fact, the largest number of US-based non-governmental organizations in recent memory–more than 150–formed a coalition to force the Bush Administration to reassess its compliance with the human rights treaty, which was signed and ratified by the US in 1992. Together, the coalition representing groups as disparate as victims of Hurricane Katrina to gays to lawyers fighting for death row inmates and Guantánamo Bay prisoners said it would continue to press the US to comply with the work of the committee. What the committee found, said Christine Chanet, chairwoman of this year's committee session, was a deterioration of human rights in the US overall. In particular, there was a lack of movement in capital punishment as well. While not forbidding the use of the death penalty, the convention commits ratifying countries to abolish it in the long run and, in the meantime, to apply extremely stringent standards to its use. The convention's underlying philosophy is that punishment should have a rehabilitative purpose. Instead, the committee found the United States still routinely executes or imprisons for life the mentally ill and imprisons for life without chance of parole offenders who were minors when they committed their crimes. "The Human Rights Committee said locking children up for life without chance of parole is an international crime," Rob Freer of Amnesty International said, adding that children are considered to be more amenable to rehabilitation and need to be afforded appropriate chances. There are believed to be at least 72 people serving life sentences who were minors at the time they committed their crimes. Moreover, while the US Supreme Court has struck down attempts at executing the mentally retarded, people with mental illness, such as paranoid schizophrenia, still are killed by the state, the committee report found. The committee also said that the US disproportionately metes out the death penalty to ethnic minorities and people with low-economic resources. Additionally, the US was increasing, rather than decreasing the number of offenses for which a defendant could be executed. For instance, states such as South Carolina and Oklahoma now have laws allowing repeat child molesters to be executed. The committee concluded that federal and state legislation in the US should be reviewed "with a view to restricting the number of offenses carrying the death penalty." Delegates disagreed in its written statement to the committee, that it discriminated against people of color. "US constitutional restraints, federal and state laws, and governmental practices have limited the death penalty to the most serious offenses and has prevented the racially discriminatory imposition of the death penalty," the US delegation wrote in a response to the committee's charges. Both Freer, of Amnesty, and Elliot of the National Coalition said they were astonished by the statement. Some 63 percent of death row inmates are people of color, yet they comprise only 25 percent of the US population overall. African-Americans make up 12 percent of the US population, but 42 percent of death row inmates. Both groups said the ICCPR's report will not have any immediate effect in the US .They did add, however, that it is an important tool. The US Supreme Court has begun to cite international law in its rulings, and in an important opinion that abolished juvenile executions in 2005, it cited international opinion. Though the report calls on the US to impose an immediate moratorium on executions, the US delegation insisted it had no power to do so, claiming most death sentences were carried out under the jurisdictions of the states. This claim of federalism is "a real obstacle" for abolitionists, Freer said, but not a complete block. "We've called on the Bush administration to impose a moratorium on federal executions, thereby showing moral leadership," he said.