MADRID–Efforts are in the works for T&T to be the venue for a meeting of the abolitionist movement to establish a Pan-Caribbean Organisation For Life unit, says Carmelo Campos Cruz of the Puerto Rican Coalition Against the Death Penalty.Cruz announced that during yesterday's session of the anti-death penalty conference which addressed Caribbean developments concerning the death penalty and the abolitionist thrust. Thirteen regional states, T&T and Cuba among them, retain the death penalty.
Cruz was among panellists, including T&T's Leela Ramdeen, Catholic Commission for Social Justice, member of Greater Caribbean for Life (GCL); Jamaica's Dr Lloyd Barnett, founding member of Greater Caribbean For Life and Sergio Ramirez, former judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Mexico.World Day Against the Death Penalty will be held on October 10 and the Caribbean and the death penalty will be the theme then.Cruz said members of the abolition movement would examine issues in the region during the event and members were thinking of meeting in T&T to set up a Pan-Caribbean Organisation For Life group to link with civil society and all regional associates.
Former UN representative to the region Mike Plat expressed scepticism about the impact a world anti-death penalty day in the region might have when one could not get tiny St Kitts to change its death-penalty laws.He noted difficulties with T&T and Jamaica in signing on to UN protocols before.Ramdeen, who acknowledged a previous T&T administration withdrew from those protocols, said some regional governments recently tried to pass legislation to implement hanging in response to high crime.She said: "We wrote every MP and senator. Every time crime rises politicians bay for blood... one has to deal with the causes of crime before we go to 'hang them high.' If we can't develop new, 21st-century strategies where are we going?"
She said the GCL believed societies must develop non-lethal methods rather than the death penalty to provide safety and ensure the well-being of the public.On the church's role in the issue, Ramdeen said the Catholic Church had taken a position but faced challenges in the Caribbean from other religious groups which demanded eye-for-an-eye justice. On regional concerns about extra-judicial killings, Ramdeen noted T&T's draft legislation to give soldiers powers of arrest."It shows desperation and we are looking for strategies that will take us down the wrong path," she added.She said T&T was not influenced by the US' use of the death penalty and US Vice President Joe Biden recently offered T&T crime-fighting support.
Jamaica's Barnett, who quoted statements by T&T attorney Douglas Mendes on the death penalty, said parliamentarians' political expediency forced them to support it. He said there was a danger abolitionist successes would be reversed, since governments were moving to make constitutional changes.He suggested the movement link its legal challenge to the death penalty with a social/cultural outreach over respect for life, targeting youths particularly. He said there was a cultural predisposition to settling problems violently and cultural outreaches were needed to change people's perceptions."I don't think talking to politicians alone will yield results but you cannot promote life with the idea of death," Barnett said.
He said he chaired a commission of enquiry into Jamaica's St Catherine's death row prison and found 95 per cent of inmates had been traumatised earlier in life or suffered social or economic dislocation.Dr Luis Fernando Nino, an Argentine judge, noted the contribution by former T&T president ANR Robinson in creating the idea for the International Criminal Court.A Guatemalan member of the audience drew to the attention of the Spanish authorities hosting the congress that a member of the former Guatemalan "Death Squad" was living in Madrid despite extradition efforts to net him.
