Towards collaboration, abolition - and dinner - in Hong Kong

Last week Marc Callcutt and I travelled to Hong Kong for a death penalty conference, where our attempts to make friends with brilliant academics resulted in a labyrinthine, often fractious search for consensus... and for a meal.

Marc had said that conferencing doesn't feel like work work and this is definitely true – the Scooby gang didn’t sit around listening to talks about the death penalty, and neither (our guilty consciences whisper) should Reprieve investigators and caseworkers! 

The thing is that at Reprieve we can’t do our work without the help of academics, activists and other practitioners and, as much as I don’t want to sound like David Brent, networking is a great way to meet people who might be able to help us, especially in South East Asia where the criminal justice system can be mysterious and unpredictable.  

So, on the final evening of the International Conference on Capital Punishment in Asia, Marc and I chatted enthusiastically to whoever we could find and launched ourselves on what we hoped would be a journey towards collaboration, information sharing and dinner. The only problem was that it turns out that academics find it pretty hard to agree on almost anything.

What we hoped would be an easy and enjoyable way to make new friends for Reprieve ended up in a labyrinthine and often fractious, journey around the malls and back streets of Hong Kong. Forgive the huge generalisation but it seemed to us, that hungry evening, that lawyers want to get things done and academics want to discuss ALL the possibilities before making a decision.  

Another big obstacle on our journey to dinner (and to the abolition of the death penalty in South East Asia) was and is public opinion, mentioned by Marc in his blog. 

Public opinion is often cited as a reason that governments can’t move towards abolishing the death penalty (or the reason why we can’t just eat in this restaurant) but as was discussed at the conference, public support for the death penalty, for example in China, is often lukewarm: most people aren’t that interested. As Dr Børge Bakken explained in his paper ‘The Norms of Death: On Capital Punishment in China’, the cultural attachment to the death penalty in China seems more mythical than factual. 

In a moment of real hope, Dr Bakken suggested that 'public opinion' often doesn't run as deep as we may think, and if you give people a good reason to change their minds, like the execution of innocent people, or the vulnerability of the poor or (to return to my silly dinner analogy) hunger and frustration, they will.