Crime & Justice, Europe, Headlines, Human Rights

DEATH PENALTY: 25 Years After Abolition, France Fosters Uncertainty

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Oct 17 2006 (IPS) - Although France abolished the death penalty 25 years ago, some of the nation’s leading institutions and politicians continue to foster the idea that capital punishment can be applied under special circumstances, especially in time of war or against terrorists.

Worried that a terrorist attack similar to the Madrid train bombings in March 2004 could occur in France, the next month, 47 conservative parliamentarians proposed re-introducing the death penalty. Although the French Parliament ignored the proposal, human rights activists worry that it points up an underlying ambiguity about capital punishment.

Civil society groups in 2005 attempted to use the parliamentary proposal as an opportunity to call for a counter-measure. They asked the government to ratify a key European Convention protocol that would eliminate the possibility of executing prisoners in times of war or against terrorists. That request, too, failed.

Protocol 13 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms was adopted by the Council of Europe in May 2002 in Vilnius, Lithuania. Although France signed the protocol at the ceremony, it has failed to ratify it, despite growing international pressure urging the French authorities to do so.

France is one of five countries within the 46-country council which have not ratified this instrument that abolishes the death penalty in time of war or of imminent threat of war. The other four are Italy, Latvia, Poland and Spain.

In October 2005, the French Constitutional Council (CC), the country’s highest legislative body, ruled that the ratification of protocol 13 would represent an “irrevocable decision,” and would impair the “essential conditions of the practice of national sovereignty” if it were to be applied “in situations endangering the very existence of the Nation.” For the same reasons, France has also failed to sign an important optional protocol to an international treaty that would abolish the death penalty in all circumstances.

The country has ratified protocol 6 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which abolishes the death penalty in peace time.

Similarly, France has failed to openly support an international campaign by European human rights groups urging the current UN general assembly to adopt a resolution establishing a world wide moratorium on death penalties.

Pierre-Henri Imbert, former general director on human rights at the Council of Europe told IPS, “the French Constitutional Council’s rationale cannot be accepted,” for it implicitly states that “the death penalty continues to be a conceivable judicial measure in France, even a necessary one depending on the circumstances.”

Moreover, the decision from the CC comes in spite of recent polls that show only a minority of the French would agree with them.

According to a survey carried out last month by the French institute for public opinion TNS Sofres, only 42 percent of French citizenry support the re-establishment of the death penalty. In 1981, when the French parliament approved the proposal of then president Francois Mitterrand, of abolishing the capital punishment, 62 percent of the French population defended death penalty as a dissuasive measure against crime.

Following the CC verdict, in January, 2006, President Jacques Chirac called for amending the French constitution, in order to incorporate the definitive abolition of the death penalty into the charter.

“Such a constitutional amendment would authenticate our adherence to the highest values of human dignity,” Chirac said at the time. Ten months later, this authentication of the French adherence to human dignity remains unfulfilled.

Human rights activists and law experts consider this paralysis inexplicable, for France abolished the death penalty on Oct. 9, 1981 and the French penal code does not foresee capital punishment at all. One human rights activist called the reasoning behind the government’s refusal to ratify incoherent.

“One single exception, even if only mentioned, would destroy all the arguments advanced for the abolition of the death penalty,” Imbert said. “Once abolished, the death penalty leaves the field of juridical possibilities, and cannot be considered as component of national sovereignty,” Imbert said.

Neither the International Court of Justice nor international tribunals created to investigate crimes committed during the wars in Yugoslavia and Rwanda have considered the death penalty as possible punishment, even though they are ruling on the most heinous crimes humankind can commit, Imbert added.

The renewed call for decapitation leaves human rights experts and activists convinced that the country’s commitment to abolition of the death penalty is fragile. Michel Taube, spokesperson for the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, said that in the last 25 years since French abolition, numerous parliamentarians have regularly proposed laws to reinstate capital punishment.

“We have to continue educating the citizenry on this matter, emphasising the reasons that led to the abolishment of the death penalty,” Taube told IPS.