Death penalty

By Clement Ferrer

     Contrary to what defenders of death penalty assert, lethal injection that kills many condemned persons to capital punishment may cause a huge suffering in the final death throes, according to the study published by Human Rights Watch.

    Moreover, United States and China lead the ranking of the countries with more death sentences. In 22 countries more than 2,000 people were executed and more than 5,000 were tried, according to the Amnesty International.

    Death penalty and its execution do not seem to worry too much to the political leaders censored by this practice. In the past 25 years the number of countries that punished condemned persons to death penalty has decreased by 50 percent. Mexico and Liberia are the countries that have abolished the death penalty from its legislation recently.

    However, in some countries, capital punishment is only intended for cases of urgency. In almost all the new States of the African continent, in Arab countries, in some oriental countries and in Russia, the death penalty remains.

    Critics assert that this penalty is in-human and it supposes to turn the Government into executioner, preventing to repair judicial slips that are irreparable when they originate.

    Meanwhile, death penalty has been excluded in laws of some developed countries. However, Japan is opposed to follow this example and has revived the death penalty in the last few years. This reactivation of hangings, a cruel medieval practice for an advanced and technological nation like the Land of the Rising Sun, has already cost Japan the censorship of many protective associations of human rights.

    Likewise, it is state that death penalty was retained in all states and in all times and this is not a valid argument, because there was also slavery and today its abolition is qualified as a social and moral improvement.

    Finally, United Nations Commission on Human Rights ratified a resolution insinuating that all countries must prohibit the death penalty, protect the dignity and the inalienable rights of all human beings in all the moments of its existence from conception until natural death.