RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Death Penalty Returns On Public Demand

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Mar 15 1999 (IPS) - The Sri Lankan government has bowed to public demands to restore capital punishment to curb an alarming rise in serious crime, including rape, but rights campaigners and religious groups are far from pleased.

“We appreciate the government’s interest to restore law and order but we are not in favour of the death penalty,” Bishop Malcolm Ranjith, secretary of the influential Catholic Bishops Conference, told the ‘Sunday Times’ newspaper.

On Saturday, the President’s Office said in a statement that the government would very soon be bringing back the death penalty – usually carried out by hanging – for murder and drug trafficking in view of the soaring crime wave.

Criminal law here includes capital punishment, but it was last carried out on Jun. 23, 1977, when a convicted killer was hanged to death. Ever since the death penalty has always been commuted to life imprisonment by the president of Sri Lanka.

In the seventies, many countries debated the ethics of capital punishment, and Sri Lanka’s decision was influenced by the fact that most people in this island nation are Buddhists, a religion that prohibits the killing of any living creature.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s latest attempt – on Aug. 20, 1995 her government made a similar announcement but it was not enforced – follows demands, including by a woman minister, for the reimposition of the death penalty as a crime deterrent.

That decision also drew flak. Activist Suriya Wickremasinghe wrote in a statement “nowhere in the world has it been shown to have any special impact in reducing crime. The death penalty is irreversible; miscarriages of justice (of which the poor and the disadvantaged are the most likely victims) can never be rectified.”

Now, a spokesman of the All Ceylon Hindu Congress has joined issue against the move. “No man has a right to take a person’s life whether he be the king or president … Life imprisonment is good enough,” said the secretary, Kandiah Neelakandan.

Desmond Fernando, ex-president of the International Bar Association, argued that the death penalty was a retrograde step and pointed out that under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Sri Lanka is obliged to take it out of its justice system.

The decision to enforce the death penalty comes on the heels of two shocking murders. Last month, a family of six including three girls, were brutally killed in their home at Hokandara, just south of Colombo, over a land dispute.

The girls were also raped but neighbours – fearing reprisals from the gang and harassment by the police – took many hours to report the day time incident at the nearest police station.

In October last year, activists and women’s groups, outraged by the brutal gang rape and murder of a newly-married Indian woman, marched on Colombo streets seeking more protection for women and harsher punishment for sex offenders.

That murder on a Colombo beach by four men who were arrested, saw a spate of letters in newspapers calling for severe punishment, including the death sentence.

“Hang the rapists,” urged a reader, O.G. Jayasinghe, writing in the ‘Midweek Mirror’ newspaper on Nov. 25. “The rape and murder of Rita is not isolated. Such crimes are carried out with impunity.”

Last year 56,000 criminal cases – including 900 incidents of rape – were recorded by the police, but hundreds of cases go unreported because victims fear reprisals by the perpetrators or believe the police will look the other way.

Increasingly summary justice is being resorted to. “When the public realises that the police is not going to protect them, then they take the law into their own hands,” confirms Prof Harendra de Silva, a paediatrician and chairman of the Child Protection Authority, who supports the death penalty.

Police however maintain they are severely understaffed and busy with security duties because of the ongoing civil war in the north and east. For 16 years, Tamil rebels have been waging a bloody battle that has often erupted in Colombo and elsewhere.

Some 15,000 army deserters, armed with stolen guns, and other undertrials out on bail are said to be involved in carrying out the bulk of the crimes. Hundreds of prisoners are freed every year on religious holidays, and other special occasions.

Last month, Justice and Constitutional Affairs Minister Gamini Peiris said the government in an effort to curb violence, would

revise laws granting general amnesty to prisoners.

That the government believes there is a link between criminals and those in authority was hinted at also by President Kumaratunga in the statement.

“Persons in high positions consorted with notorious figures of the underworld. Criminals convicted of rape and criminal assault were given presidential pardons, some were being elevated even to Justices of Peace,” the statement quotes her saying.

According to the statement, henceforth the government will grant amnesty only on one day, Independence Day, instead of the six annual occasions.

RIGHTS-SRI LANKA: Death Penalty Returns On Public Demand

By Feizal Samath Reprint | | Print |

Feizal Samath

COLOMBO, Mar 15 1999 (IPS) - The Sri Lankan government has bowed to public demands to restore capital punishment to curb an alarming rise in serious crime, including rape, but rights campaigners and religious groups are far from pleased.
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