Sunday 8 January 2017

Australia’s campaign against the death penalty – real or phony?

On 10 October 2016, Australia’s Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, commemorated World Day Against the Death Penalty with a media release.
Her eyes fixed on Australia’s candidacy for the United Nations Human Rights Council – in which abolition of the death penalty is purportedly a national priority – Minister Bishop said the right things. The penalty constituted cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment regardless of how it was carried out. Given the lack of any ‘credible evidence that it is an effective crime deterrent’ the penalty was senseless. It was ‘regularly associated with miscarriages of justice, the inadvertent execution of innocents, and the disproportionate execution of poor, ethnic and religious minorities’.
All true, and welcome comment for those of us who believe that the death penalty has no place in a world with pretences of civilisation.
Fast forward to 12 December 2016 when Ms Bishop delivered a ‘Human Rights Speech’ to the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney. In forum after forum, the Minister declared, ‘whether in bilateral meetings or in multilateral settings like the United Nations, Australia has argued the case for abolition - with calm, with patience and with determination’.
And, regrettably it seems, with a distinct lack of success.
If 2015 figures are anything to go by, between Ms Bishop’s media release in October 2016 and her Lowy Institute speech two months later some 250 people were executed by governments world-wide. And that figure excludes China, the world’s leading official killer, which treats death penalty data as a state secret.
Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect a major diplomatic offensive every time someone is executed. But what levers, if any, is the Australian Government pulling to pressure the world’s top five executing states: China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States?
Less than a week before Ms Bishop’s Lowy Institute speech, William Sallie was killed by lethal injection in the US state of Georgia. He had been on death row for 25 years. What did the Australian Government say to US governments about Sallie’s execution, or the 18 other executions in the US that preceded it in 2016? Very little it seems, if material I received in response to an earlier FOI request is any guide.
A cable from the Australian Embassy in Washington dated 18 September 2015 advised the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra: ‘Since January 2014 we have not made any representations to the US federal government on the death penalty.’
An email from DFAT to the embassy on 10 March 2016 asked: ‘We are responding to a piece of mincor [ministerial correspondence] on the death penalty … just wondering whether there are bilateral representations we could refer to?’ The reply: ‘Nothing at the federal level but a bit at the state level.’
This email exchange hardly suggests an energised, determined effort. The 'bit at state level' in fact was 'in support of foreign nationals, at the request of their governments'. No independent initiative there. Yet six months earlier, in announcing Australia’s candidacy for the UN Human Rights Council, Minister Bishop asserted that Australia would be ‘a strong advocate for global abolition of the death penalty, one of Australia’s core human rights objectives.’
Ben Quilty, Archibald Prize winner and mentor and confidant of Myuran Sukumaran, is currently co-curating an exhibition of Sukumaran's art which coincides with the 50th anniversary of the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the last person executed in Australia. Quilty wrote recently that 2017 was a year for ‘all Australian to stand up … against the death penalty’. Internationally, he claimed, ‘in 2017 we will have the moral high ground, the soapbox, and it should be used’.
Yet if Australia is truly to occupy the moral high ground, if its campaign against the death penalty is to have meaning, its advocacy needs to be more open and consistent. It must be genuinely universal, not mostly reserved for the occasions when Australians are facing the hangman or the swordsman, the bullet or the needle. 

On that, we have a long way to go.   

4 comments:

  1. Peter, I agree Australian representation has dropped on this topic...is it due to the narrow lead that Liberals have? Or it is just that they don't have unity within on this topic?

    Regardless, it seems to be something that requires the removal of acts of terror before we can proceed, e.g. both Britain and Australia achieved a slight majority supporting terror based death penalty in 2014 source: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/international-polls-and-studies-0#AUS092314. Sympathy wanes when we have acts of terror.

    This 4 pager that is pretty punchy from the same site - http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/FactSheet.pdf

    Julie does not seem to have Barnaby under control either, by discussion is he suggesting we consider reinstating the death penalty in Australia? Some interesting times ahead;
    - http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-32579232
    - http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-01/abjorensen-are-we-really-united-in-our-opposition/6436942
    - http://www.spookmagazine.com/a-cold-fact-not-all-australians-oppose-the-death-penalty/

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    1. Thanks Adam and you're absolutely right that the problem of terrorism prompts support for capital punishment. But it rests on the same fallacy that underpins belief in capital punishment more broadly - that it will deter crime. Does anyone seriously believe that an 'ideologically' driven terrorist will be put off by the prospect of being killed? It may in fact be an inducement to murder. As far as I can see, the US is the only country where there's been a serious effort to quantify 'deterrence'. There, econometricians have reached dramatically different conclusions. Three of them commented a few years ago on ‘the ease with which a researcher can, through choice of modelling assumptions, produce evidence either that each execution costs many lives or saves many lives’. They demonstrated this by running 1996 death penalty data in three different ways producing the following result from each additional execution: 63 more murders or 21 lives saved; 98 more murders or 31 lives saved; 22 more murders or 19 lives saved. Conclusion: be very wary about the deterrence argument, especially when it comes to terrorism.

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  2. Which campaign from any Australian political or lobbying group is ever, or has ever been, "open and consistent" in the last 50 years? Our government's real efforts on legal and judicial matters need first to be ensuring our legal system here improves continuously. That takes more resources than is really available from the folks in office as it should. It really isn't for anyone here to try and influence the judicial or domestic politics of another sovereign country. The only extenuating circumstance I could think of is when an Australian's wellbeing abroad is at risk, from being sentenced to death by a foreign government, or anything else that would obligate Australian government to act on. The Australian government does have the obligation to try as far as reasonable to ensure the wellbeing of its citizens and permanent residents where ever they are in world. Our views on the death penalty relative to countries that still have it as a sentence option doesn't need consistency or evenly dispersed. Just that we oppose it is enough. There is still rife corruption in Police and too many miscarriages of justice in all our states, many that haven't been for malicious prosecution, or police corruption too. Anything that is left over after first servicing our own system, can then be allocated to what ever issue more broadly. Common law legal systems haven't ever been perfect, and nor will they ever be. So they need to be constantly observed, reviewed etc. Services here can be the example others can use as a basis for comparison because ours are pretty darn exceptional.

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  3. 'Our views on the death penalty relative to countries that still have it as a sentence option doesn't need consistency or evenly dispersed. Just that we oppose it is enough.'

    Consistency helps to give us credibility. If we try to influence other countries only when Australian lives are at stake we are both hypocritical and cowardly.

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