The European Union (EU), Norway and Canada have joined the Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka (HRCSL) in opposing the decision to implement the death penalty.
The delegation of the European Union to Sri Lanka, in agreement with the EU Heads of Missions, the High Commissioner of Canada, and the Ambassador of Norway, has written a letter to President Maithripala Sirisena addressing the issue.
In a statement, the EU said that the letter was written “to verify the worrying information in the public domain about the intention of the Sri Lankan government to resume implementing the death penalty after a moratorium of more than 40 years.”
“The death penalty is incompatible with human dignity, does not have any proven deterrent effect, and allows judicial errors to become fatal and irreversible,” the statement said.
This comes on the heels of the Human Rights Commission’s letter to President Maithripala Sirisena, urging him to reconsider imposing the death penalty. Speaking to the Daily News, Dr. Deepika Udagama, Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission of Sri Lanka, was adamant that “nowhere in the world the death penalty works as a deterrent for crime. Even in the U.S., the federal states that retain the death penalty still have very high crime rates as opposed to states that have abolished it.”
“There is an appearance of being effective, but our position is that as a democratic society, we should look at crime prevention and crime control in a deeper way. We should look at the root causes rather than trying to treat the symptom,” argued Udagama.
The Human Rights Commission has listed numerous national and international resolutions opposing capital punishment: the UN’s calls to issue a moratorium on the death penalty—Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the Second Option Protocol adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1989—as well as Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court decision that Article 11 of the Constitution prohibits torture and inhumane treatment or punishment, and the precedence of Sri Lanka’s previous governments of not implementing the death penalty.
The Commission’s views have been conveyed to President Sirisena in another letter from January 2016, in which they stated, “There is no empirical data, to show that the death penalty has caused a reduction in crime or has a deterrent effect on crime.”
In its January 2016 letter, the Commission points out that Sri Lanka’s criminal justice system does not have a process that permits criminal cases from being reopened after appeals are exhausted, creating “a serious risk of a miscarriage of justice. Although due process in criminal proceedings are guaranteed by the Constitution and statutory law, there is always the possibility of human error distorting the final outcome.”
The previous letter highlighted one instance of prosecutorial misconduct in Sri Lanka, Wijepala v Attorney General (2001) 1 SLR 42. In that case, the Supreme Court found that insufficient evidence led to the appellant’s conviction: “The evidence of Senaratne who was the sole eyewitness to the incident is open to suspicion. The trial judge had failed to appreciate that his evidence in regard to the identity of the appellant has not been supported by any other item of evidence.” Additionally, the Commission pointed to the possibility that economics plays a role in the justice system, where underprivileged people have limited means to hire competent or experienced defence counsels.
With the government battling to eradicate a growing narcotics problem, President Sirisena said recently that he would sign required orders to execute capital punishment for convicted drug traffickers who carry out large scale drug smuggling operations while in detention.