New York 14.10.99

To be here in an American university, among Americans fighting for the abolition of the death penalty, is a moving experience for me. It takes my mind back to last February, back to the images broadcast by the TV networks on the morning when the world discovered that Karla Faye Tucker had been executed in Huntsville, Texas, in the penitentiary known as "The Wall". Images which are etched in my memory. I can see the prison bed, and I think back to the lethal injection given to the first woman convict to be executed for over a century. And I can see the face of that woman, who after pleading guilty was condemned to death and executed, despite the pleas for grace from all over the world.

Very few executions in recent years have raised as much outcry from ordinary people and commentators in many countries around the world; and rarely has an execution been accompanied outside the prison in which it was taking place by such fierce protest against the death penalty.

I will leave the task of analyzing the Tucker case, its meaning and its effects, to students of the mass media. On my part, I would like to make some considerations about the case that regard our battle against the death penalty. Considerations about the emotions that every public execution inevitably stirs up - at the same time - in the consciences of both opponents and advocates of the death penalty. Powerful, opposing emotions, which exacerbate the divisions in any discussion. Emotions which are deeply human, but which deflect the attention from the execution itself to the person executed. Thus inevitably creating the highly emotive scenario in which the same person assumes the roles of hero and villain. Sanctified in some way by the pity and the love of those who wish to prevent the assassination, and demonized pitilessly by those who desperately need monsters to explain why the death penalty is necessary. It seems to me that this periodic polarization of emotions ends up by making discussion more diffic

ult and by widening the divide that separates the two sides.

It would be better, in my opinion, to keep the basic issue - the death penalty - separate from other questions regarding individual cases: such as the guilt or innocence of the condemned, or our sympathy or aversion towards them. Were we not taught that the crime should be kept separate from the perpetrator? Is this not the reason why we believe the death penalty to be unjust, even when applied to the worst of the mass murderers in the former Yugoslavia, or to the most ruthless of the génocidaires in Rwanda? Is this not the reason why, inspired by an episode from the Bible, we chose the phrase "Hands Off Cain" as our motto?

Five years' experience as European Commissioner for Humanitarian Action, five years in the face of all the horrors of our time - from the Balkans to Africa, from Sri Lanka to Central America - have only strengthened my conviction that no crime - no horror - can be wiped out, or even simply redressed, by another crime - another horror -, carried out in cold blood in the name of a State.

This opinion is shared by the jurists and politicians who met last July in Rome to draw up the founding Treaty of the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, excluding the death penalty even for this type of crime. I believe that this choice constitutes an important step forward towards the definitive elimination of the death penalty from international justice.

One example might be more useful than a whole campaign in influencing public opinion. I am thinking of the only sentence - a prison sentence -issued so far by the Court in the Hague against the Bosnian Serb criminal Tadic. And yet the crimes of Tadic are clearly much more serious than those committed by any of the 3,000 people sentenced to death in the United States or by those, for example, who face the executioner for fraud in China, for blasphemy in Afghanistan, or for drug-dealing in Saudi Arabia.

What we should ask ourselves, therefore, is whether, in order to rally support against the death penalty, it is really necessary to divide the world up into the good and the evil, to create martyrs and to play on feelings of pity. We should ask ourselves whether this support should not be invoked above all in defense of ourselves and of our dignity as human beings: because the application of the death penalty in the name of society makes us all, the members of that society, morally similar to the criminal we wish to punish.

I am among those who believe that the great American democracy, strengthened also by the struggles for the advancement of civil rights, a democracy which has shown that it considers individual freedom and dignity as rights to be safeguarded, is itself a patrimony of mankind. And yet I hear a great many Americans saying that the safeguard of freedom and dignity is not important for people guilty of certain crimes. I, on the other hand, say that it is even more important. It is easy to guarantee the rights of people who respect the rules. But let us not forget that at one time - not so long ago - civil rights and liberties were not guaranteed in equal measure for everyone. Some people were excluded because of the color of their skin (in South Africa in very recent times, and in the United States before that). Some people are still excluded even today because of their sex (Afghan or Saudi women, for example), because of their social caste, or for other reasons.

And if we consider the fundamental human rights, we realize that the area of exclusion stretches even wider.

And yet:

if there exist globally shared human rights;

and if the defense of these rights has led the international community to confirm its right and duty of "humanitarian interference" wherever serious violations occur;

we must begin to consider capital punishment as a crime against humanity which must be prevented.

Some people will accuse me of being rhetorical. Never mind. I really think that every person killed in a gas chamber or on an electric chair, by a firing squad or a hangman, is not just a citizen of America, China, the Middle East, Africa or any of the seventy-two countries that still practice the death penalty. That person is one of us, and his or her murder - although "legal" - offends us just as the mass murders in Bosnia, Rwanda and Timor offended us.

No democratic state, not even the United States, can deceive itself that the death penalty can be "democratic", that there is some difference between a lethal injection carried out in the name of democratic institutions, and a hanging ordered by a dictatorship such as China. We are faced with exactly the same crime. This was confirmed in 1997 by the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, which defined the death penalty as a negation of human rights and consequently approved the first resolution for a moratorium on executions.

Since then there has been a gradual increase in the number of countries who have adhered to the moratorium, and consequently to the statement in the resolution that reads: "the abolition of the death penalty contributes to the elevation of human dignity and to the progressive development of human rights".

How should we proceed? Of all the battles for the dignity of the individual, the campaign against the death penalty seemed, until recently, to be one of the longest and toughest. Because there is a thread that binds all those who continue to believe in the "need" for capital punishment, a thread that crosses borders and continents as well as ideological and religious convictions.

We then discovered that we, too, have a common inspiration, a common cause with converts in every corner of the earth. And we now realize that we have found the right weapon - the moratorium, to which this conference is devoted - to break up the bloc of countries in favor of the death penalty.

The United Nations is facing an appointment that may be historically important. By December, the General Assembly in progress here in New York may ask for an end to executions throughout the world. In June 1998, the member states of the European Union made a joint declaration in favor of the abolition of the death penalty and decided to launch an international campaign against the use of capital punishment. The fifteen member states defined the initiative against the death penalty in the world as "an intrinsic element of the policy of the European Union in the field of human rights". A political objective that is now pursued by all the member states of the Union. The moratorium gives those states that still apply the death penalty the time necessary to find alternative forms of punishment. And the ABA is demanding a moratorium here in America, where the judicial system is as committed to civil rights as anywhere in the world. But even this commitment to civil rights, as the information and the cases you have

illustrated prove, is not sufficient: it often ends up surrendering and abandoning condemned prisoners to their destiny.

I have met lawyers who concentrate on single cases, often desperate, of defendants accused of crimes punishable by the death penalty, and who fight ceaselessly against capital punishment in the courtrooms and the prisons of this country. Right now I am meeting convicted criminals in the prisons and people who have been released after many years on death row after their innocence has been proved. As a member of the European Parliament I will try to give my support to the pragmatic work undertaken every day in the United Stated by those who oppose the death penalty, by those who want to help this great country, its democracy and its institutions to shed the unbearable burden of practicing state homicide.

1999 may be a decisive year for the moratorium decided by the United nations, with the possibility of a solemn declaration that would crown the work carried out on the ground.

Yesterday I visited a prison in Illinois, and I met some of the convicts facing the death penalty. In the next few weeks I will try to visit other prisoners, and I will be with you and with all those who have been fighting for this objective at the United Nations, in a campaign that must unite all voices so that the UN vote does not remain within its own corridors. Approval is by no means certain. Our adversaries are experienced fighters, and there is also the risk that not all the countries who present the resolution will defend it concretely. For this reason we need the support of public opinion in the next few weeks, and we need to create a powerful debate here in the United States. From this point of view this conference, and the commitment of Columbia University and the Italian Academy who have organized it, are admirable and invaluable.

If we win at the United Nations, it will not be a point of arrival, but rather a new starting point. An important step that will open up a difficult path that we will have to take together.

PAGE 5

PAGE 1