Human Rights and Social Justice Conference
World will ban death penalty by '30: lawyer
Reprinted from the Winnipeg Free Press
Sat Feb 24 2007
By Nick Martin
EVERY country in the world will ban the death penalty by 2030, Canadian human rights lawyer William Schabas boldly predicted Friday.
Schabas, now director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, said at the pace countries are banning the death penalty, the world will celebrate the end of executions by 2030.
"It's as predictable as that the glaciers in Greenland will be gone by 2030, that the death penalty will be behind us," he told the Human Rights and Social Justice conference at the University of Winnipeg.
When Winnipeg opens the Canadian Museum for Human Rights at The Forks, Schabas said, "Somewhere in that museum, there should be an exhibit about the abolition of the death penalty.
"You'd have to start with Louis Riel -- that execution poisoned the country for many years," he said.
But, he emphasized, that exhibit should include a graph showing that the number of countries allowing executions is steadily declining every year. "A majority of states in the world have abolished the death penalty," said Schabas, part of a 1999 legal team which argued at the Supreme Court that Canada should not extradite anyone to the U.S. who faced the death penalty.
From 1948 to 1979, one or two countries a year ended capital punishment, and since then the rate has been two or three a year.
"We have 132 countries that have abolished the death penalty, and there are about 60 left," he said.
Schabas said no one had any sympathy for Saddam Hussein, but his recent execution provoked global revulsion and accusations that he had not had a fair trial.
"We felt this was also a violation of our own dignity," he said. "We have to punish (tyrants) in a manner that is compatible with our own sense of dignity."
One delegate identifying herself as an American said she could not share Schabas's optimism that the U.S. would also ban the death penalty.
nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca