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Nigeria’s fetish with the death penalty is becoming stranger 05 Aug 2016

It is a matter of subjective reasoning that most people favour the death penalty as a just punishment for crime. Personal feelings of loss, retribution and perceived injustice inform people's justification for supporting capital punishment. Notwithstanding, it is a monumental moral contradiction for anyone who seeks justice to request a sentence of death for another person.
    
On July 28, three Nigerians – out of the dozens of Nigerian drug-trafficking convicts in Indonesian prisons – were executed by firing squad. Four others were granted a last-minute stay of execution, although the authorities provided no reason for the reprieve. Except for a few people who condemned the executions, much of the commentaries in Nigeria were simply cavalier. And the reason is not far-fetched. Apart from just being a country that retains the death penalty for ordinary crimes, Nigeria metes out some of the highest death sentences in the world.

In 2015, the country issued 171 death sentences, the fourth highest in the world after China, Egypt and Bangladesh. According to Amnesty International, an estimated 1,673 people are on death row in Nigeria as of end of year 2015. Significantly, there has been an unofficial moratorium on executions over the last three years. The last judicial executions in Nigeria took place in 2013. Nevertheless, there has been a clamour for the death penalty to be applied to a much longer list of crimes in Nigeria.

Many influential people including religious leaders, legal practitioners, and labour union leaders have unabashedly called for the use of the death penalty as punishment for crimes such kidnapping, rape and corruption. Unfortunately, these advocacies for capital punishment are in violation of United Nations guidelines for the use of the death penalty; they run contrary to facts, and they buck the international trend of abolishing capital punishment.

Starting with the last point, the number of countries that eliminated the death penalty statutes for all crimes have increased from 60 in 1996 to 102 as of December 31, 2015. Countries that joined the league of abolitionists in 2015 were Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Fiji, and the South American state of Suriname. Furthermore, 140 countries or more than two thirds of the nations in the world have abolished capital punishment in law or practice, according to Amnesty International. Countries that are considered abolitionists in practice are those that retain the death penalty in their laws but have not carried out any executions during the last 10 years. They are basically edging towards dropping capital crimes from their laws.   

And then there is the erroneous belief that capital punishment deters crime. Indonesia's Deputy Attorney-General, Noor Rachmad, said although the executions may not be pleasant, they are only aimed at halting drug crimes. A response to such rhetoric for the justification of capital punishment for drug traffickers is summed up by an advocacy group, Harm Reduction International, which said, "Iran has some of the toughest drug laws in the world and a high prevalence of injection drug use. Sweden does not have the death penalty and it has comparatively low rates of problematic drug use."

The panacea for high crime rate including corruption in Nigeria is certainly not the adoption China's draconian Criminal Law. Under this law, China reportedly carries out more than a thousand executions annually. If it is the question of deterrence, there is no evidence that capital punishment deters crime to a larger extent than imprisonment does. In the United States, a retentionist country where the death penalty is a contentious issue, researchers and legal experts say there is not even an infinitesimal evidence supporting the argument that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder.

The South African Constitutional court, the country's supreme court, which made the ruling that abolished the death penalty in 1995 provided what is arguably the strongest case against capital punishment. The court said, "There will always be unstable, desperate, and pathological people for whom the risk of arrest and imprisonment provides no deterrent, but there is nothing to show that a decision to carry out the death sentence would have any impact on the behaviour of such people, or that there will be more of them if imprisonment is the only sanction."

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is also a strong advocate against the death penalty. But while the UN is adept at churning out statistics on human rights violations, the intergovernmental organisation is simply ineffective at tackling state-sanctioned violations of human rights. The catastrophe in Syria is an example of the most epic failure of the United Nations where conflicts of national interest often trump the ideals of upholding human rights.    

Article 6 of the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) does not prohibit the death penalty. However, its guidelines restrict capital punishment to "serious crimes," which have been interpreted to exclude drug offences. And “serious crimes” by UN interpretation hardly constitute economic crimes or kidnapping. Indonesia, a country that is a signatory to the international human rights treaty, is already in violation of the treaty with its execution of drug offenders.  

International and domestic pressure has proved to be effective in the campaign against the death penalty. Due to increased pressure by civil society,  the death sentences given to 66 Nigerian soldiers – who, back in 2014, were accused of criminal conspiracy and conspiracy to commit mutiny – were later commuted to 10-year jail terms for each of the alleged offenders.

An addendum to the UN treaty, the Second Optional Protocol, encourages its members to commit to the abolition of the death penalty within their borders. Two African countries, Madagascar and Congo signed the treaty last year. With South Africa already leading Nigeria in stopping capital punishment within its border, the voices Nigerian lawmakers must listen to are those that would help advance the ideals of the individual's “inherent right to life;” not the violent calls for death sentences.