Trinidad and Tobago, like other nations in the Caribbean, is troubled by the rise in brutal murders and other crimes associated with drug trafficking. Here in Rome, also like some other nations, it has a special worry: how to support a global court that could try the worst crimes, but would not apply the death penalty.

The English-speaking Caribbean nations of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) in general have supported the same principles for a strong International Criminal Court (ICC) as European and Latin American nations debating the matter, but the question of the death penalty has been an exception.

“Trinidad and Tobago has the death penalty for murder. If a murderer can get the death penalty, it’s very difficult to reconcile it with someone who committed genocide getting life in prison,” says a Caribbean legal expert, speaking on condition of anonymity. “I really think this is a general Caribbean, Caricom view.”

Support for the death penalty, however, puts Trinidad and other Caricom members in a complex position with their allies among “like-minded” states that share the Caribbean bloc’s views on a strong ICC prosecutor and limited U.N. Security Council involvement.

Many Caricom states, such as Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and Barbados – the four most populous members – support the death penalty, whereas most of its allies in Western Europe, Latin America and also South Africa have ended capital punishment.

As a consequence, much of the group – and presumably a majority of nations overall – will not accept applying the death penalty to genocide and other core crimes, leaving life imprisonment as the maximum penalty which could be imposed by the proposed court.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan concedes the difficulties in providing for capital punishment as “there are many governments in the U.N. who do not accept the death penalty” in their own national laws.

“Speaking personally, I do not see how the death penalty can be imposed by a Court that is now under discussion, given the differences among juridical systems among the member states,” Annan says. “In the two ad hoc tribunals that (the UN) has set up for Bosnia and Rwanda, death penalties are not part of the punishment.”

The likelihood that the death penalty might not be on the agenda, however, poses a vexing political problem for the Caribbean nations eager to support the ICC.

A Caribbean source told IPS that “as far as the ICC is concerned, there’s no way that Trinidad and Tobago can endorse a position against the death penalty.”

If, as expected, the death penaly is not accepted for the ICC, the government in Port-of-Spain therefore will be in an awkward position – willing to sign on to the ICC statute, but not wanting to imply that by doing so it might favour abolishing the death penalty, he added.

Capital punishment has proven to be politically popular in Trinidad and Tobago, where some 90 percent of the population supports the death penalty, according to recent polls.

Such heavy political support has pushed Prime Minister Basdeo Panday’s government to expedite procedures to execute five convicted murderers by the end of this. That effort in turn has pitted the government against both the British-established privy court – which does not have a death penalty – and the Inter- American Court on Human Rights, which has called for a stay of the executions.

Nor is Trinidad and Tobago the only Caricom nation wanting to press ahead in implementing the death penalty. Both the Barbadian and Guyanese governments plan to follow Trinidad’s lead, in withdrawing from the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, so that they too may speed up executions.

The move favoring the gallows has been prompted, at least in part, by the other major problem that Caricom wants the ICC to address – drug trafficking, which has been blamed by experts for rising violence and a surge in grisly murder cases throughout the region.

“The illicit traffic in narcotic drugs continues to have devastating effects in our region,” Trinidadian Attorney General Ramesh Maharaj told delegates at the Rome conference last week. “Drug traffickers have adversely affected the fabric of Caribbean societies … The trans-boundary activities of drug traffickers and that of their armed supporters pose a grave threat to humanity.”

One European lawyer says that Caricom nations are still lobbying for support in placing drug trafficking on the list of major crimes which the ICC would be empowered to deal with, and have won the support of a handful of other nations to that end.

But while then-Trinidadian Prime Minister Arthur Robinson proposed originally that the ICC combat drug trafficking when he first introduced the issue to the UN General Assembly in 1988, few nations now support inclusion of the issue.

“Clearly one can see that the trend is against including (drug trafficking) in treaty crimes” before the ICC, the Caribbean delegate says. He adds, however, that Caricom is holding out for at least the possibility that drug trafficking may be added to the Court’s agenda at a later review, perhaps within five years.