Q. The U.S. Congress had ruled that a referendum be held in the District of Columbia, seat of the federal Capital, Washington (one of the 15 legislatures which have still not reinstated capital punishment after it was suspended in 1972), to coincide with the presidential elections, on the reinstatement of the death penalty on that territory.
What do you think about the fact than an advanced society such as the American one resorts to a referendum to reinstate the death penalty?
FEJTÖ: First of all, I believe a democracy is never sufficiently advanced. All democracies have weak spots.
The American democracy, which carried out a role as a pioneer, as an avant-garde, contains remains of Medieval intolerance. One of these remains is this need for the death penalty.
It is obvious that Lincoln had to struggle against most of his country, but this did not prevent him from struggling for the integrity and unity of America, for the abolition of slavery. And this, in the historical perspective, occurred not too long ago.
In America, the struggles between the forces of the "Enlightenment" - so to say - and the forces of obscurantism, continue.
These attempts to maintain or reinstate the death penalty are part of this obscurantist tradition, against which the American progressivists continue to struggle.
Q. Can a referendum decide on issues that regard the individual's inalienable rights?
FEJTÖ: I believe there are two conceptions of democracy.
We could say there is a totalitarian conception of democracy...We shouldn't forget, for example, that Hitler came into power democratically, that he had a majority.
There is a majority conception of democracy which can lead to authoritarianism and even totalitarianism, and there is a conception of liberal democracy, which places the values of freedom and dignity of the human rights above democracy, i.e. above the decision of a majority.
The believe this is the essential alternative: democracy when the majority imposes decisions which can be obscurantist and reactionary, or a democracy where certain forms of consent linked to the fact that the majority cannot impose its dictates to a minority, especially in the case of values which are superior to that of democracy itself.
Personally speaking, I believe freedom is a value which is superior to democracy, and this is why democracies tend to correct the electoral and majority democracy with institutions such as, for example, constitutional councils, which can declare the decisions taken by the parliamentary majority or by the majority of the universal suffrage to be unconstitutional.
Q. Is it fair to respond to the heinousness of the crimes and to their growth with a justice other than that according to which "he who kills must be killed?"
FEJTÖ. Personally speaking, according to the historical context, there are moments in which barbarity and violence assume proportions such as to call for measures. In certain cases, for a certain type of crime - for example, in the case of children or elderly who are murdered - the death penalty can seem justified.
Regarding this point, Joseph II, the enlightened despot who abolished the death penalty in the Austrian monarchy, said that there are crimes that are so great, that the death penalty is too soft, too gentle a punishment. Joseph II believed that sentencing a person to forced labour was a punishment worse and more dissuasive than the death penalty itself, which, after all, lasts only a few minutes, whereas those who are sentenced to life imprisonment suffer more, if we consider the justice system as a punishment for the crimes committed, to be repaired through sufferance.
Whatever the justification for the abolition or the maintenance of the death penalty, which in any case is a remnant of the barbaric centuries, I believe the abolition of the death penalty is more decorous for our century, that claims to be more democratic than the previous centuries, which were in fact more liberal.
As far as I'm concerned, I am voting for the abolition of the death penalty in every part of the world.
