DEATH PENALTY: Britain Puts Together Two Faces

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Jan 2 2007 (IPS) - The British government has found a simple way of welcoming the death penalty for Saddam Hussein while saying it opposes the death penalty.

After former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was hanged, the government simply said both things, with no clear indication that the government cannot quite welcome what it opposes.

“I welcome the fact that Saddam Hussein has been tried by an Iraqi court for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed against the Iraqi people,” foreign secretary Margaret Beckett said after the death sentence was carried out. “He has now been held to account.”

She added: “We advocate an end to the death penalty worldwide, regardless of the individual or the crime. We have made our position very clear to the Iraqi authorities, but we respect their decision as that of a sovereign nation.”

The first part of her statement welcomed the trial of Saddam ? with the consequences of that trial known. Fuzzy diplomatese overlaid the rest; Saddam had been “held to account.” Beckett’s statement suggests that the British government had expressed opposition to the death penalty itself as punishment, but threw up its hands in the face of Iraq’s sovereignty.

Amnesty International opposes the death penalty, and acts to push that position. Not everyone sees that the British government did anything similar.

“Amnesty International would have expected the British government to have used its influence with the Iraqi government to prevent use of the death penalty,” James Dyson from Amnesty told IPS.

Amnesty International would have expected the British government to have used its influence with the Iraqi government to prevent use of the death penalty.

Beckett’s bland, almost blasé statement, speaks of a formally stated position that few can deny is at odds with the reality of Iraq. Few will describe Iraq today as a sovereign nation – 140,000 U.S. troops besides about 7,000 British troops and thousands from some other nations are not around as polite foreigners.

Few can pretend that Saddam was given proper judicial trial by an Iraqi court; quite apart from the serially and seriously flawed judicial process, the trial was influenced if not directed by U.S. authorities. That Saddam Hussein remained in U.S. rather than Iraqi custody up to the very end was only the last, if the most dramatic, indication of this.

And for Britain to have opposed the death penalty for Saddam would have in effect therefore meant opposing its very big brother, the United States. Beckett’s statement suggests that Britain took a position opposed to that of the United States over the death penalty. Whatever the official expressions of the British position, this clearly did not become an issue between Britain and the United States.

British officials evidently did try to bring some semblance of fairness into the trial proceedings, but as it turns out with no success at all.

“British officials made a positive contribution to trying to make the trial more fair,” Richard Dicker from Human Rights Watch told IPS. “But at the same time, this was a proceeding clearly heading towards capital punishment. How they can reconcile the contradiction between opposition to the death penalty on the one hand, and their commitment to fair trial, only they can answer.”

The government is not confronting that question, or offering answers, primarily because no one is asking. In Britain, not the opposition parties, not the media. Two contradictory positions stated in two paragraphs with the most invisible gloss over the obvious – and that was that.

And why just the death penalty: just as the government opposes the death penalty, it stands for fair trial. And there too the British just stated a position flying in the face of all known facts.

“We oppose the death penalty in all cases as a violation of the right to life and the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment, but it is especially abhorrent when this most extreme penalty is imposed after an unfair trial,” said Malcolm Smart, director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa programme.

As the British government would have everyone believe, two wrongs in Saddam’s case did make a right.