Dealing with the death penalty in Asia

For the past two days, I have been attending a conference in Hong Kong, from where I am writing.

It feels like a break from work, to be honest, as normally when I am abroad the day is spent rushing from one meeting to the next, or desperately writing memos. And of course there still is that – our first night we met with the lawyer and family members of three British nationals in Thailand, still in prison over 3 years after their death sentence was overturned and they were acquitted. In fact, as I write this Harriet, on her first trip for Reprieve outside the USA, is probably writing up that memo.

However, the conference days passed at a more leisurely pace, as we discussed various issues surrounding the death penalty abolitionist movements across Asia. Perhaps most interesting was the question of Professor Frank Zimring who opened the conference by asking whether Asia’s retention of the death penalty is due to the fact that it simply lags behind Europe in terms of its social and political development, or whether Asia is a separate beast all together. His answer was that we could not be sure, which sounds like a fairly neat way to start a weekend of debate at a conference, but some of his arguments provoked thought.

The issue of public opinion and its effect on abolition reared its head a few times.  Professor Zimring argued that although public support for the death penalty remained relatively high, it is not significantly higher than European countries. Which begged the question: if there is so much support for the death penalty, how do countries manage to abolish it? The answer appeared to be that people will express an opinion without really caring. A 2003 study in China demonstrates this perfectly. China is responsible for somewhere around 97% of global executions in any given year, and receives good support (58% in a 2008 survey), but when respondents were asked how strongly they felt about the death penalty, only 26% rated themselves as “interested” or “very interested”.

In fact, the conference seemed to agree that the crucial element to the prominence of the death penalty is whether or not there is an autocratic regime or not. Apparently the desire to enforce capital punishment has real appeal if you can use it on your political enemies. But this itself offers hope – the current political status quo is unlikely to survive the continued economic growth, as economic prosperity has historically gone hand in hand with democracy.

Dr Zimrings speech was a fascinating start to a day that covered the death penalty in Singapore, Taiwan and Malaysia, although China was the real focus. Encouragingly everyone was positive about the steps China have made in the past 15 years, and believe that China is moving slowly towards real progress.

The other big controversy came when discussing the death penalty in India, where executions can only take place in the “rarest of rare” cases. This standard is decided by judges, and different judges have interpreted it differently, leading to a seemingly arbitrary application. The solution of Proffesor Surya Deva? Only have the mandatory death penalty. Needless to say the room disagreed, but it led to an interesting debate on whether judge-led arbitrariness or legislation led arbitrariness was the lesser evil.

Coming away from the conference, and getting back to the day job, I feel that I have a better understanding of where our work fits in the history of a country’s relationship with the death penalty and this provides an important cultural context for our work. Perhaps more importantly, the opportunity to meet local practitioners and people that work on the ground in countries half-way across the world, where prisoners are locked up, and ask for advice provides us with new ideas with which to pursue their case. The meetings around the coffee table are as important as the debate in the conference room.

And to ensure that everyone mingles, we get given spring rolls and dim sum every coffee break.  As a result, I have been mingling more than normal…