10 October is the 11th World Day against the Death Penalty. The campaign represents an alliance of 145 NGOs, bar associations, unions and other bodies – including Catholic organisations like the Community of Sant’Egidio – that was set up in Rome on 13 May 2002.The United Kingdom, which supports its work, campaigns for worldwide abolition of the death penalty because we believe it undermines human dignity, there is no evidence that it works as a deterrent (despite popular myth), and because any error in its application is irreversible – the horrible possibility that the state could, and in the past has, taken innocent life through judicial processes designed to protect that life.
21 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes since 2002. Yet 21 countries still carried out executions in 2012, and some countries including India and Pakistan resumed executions after a lengthy moratorium. Only 100 countries have definitively removed the death penalty from their statute books.
Many of the countries that retain the death penalty in their legislation, and a number that still carry out the death penalty, have significant Catholic populations, including many countries in the Caribbean and central Africa, the United States (where 30 states retain the death penalty), Lebanon, even an overwhelmingly Catholic country like Guatemala. Yet the teaching of successive Popes against the death penalty is very clear, and the Vatican itself has symbolically abolished the death penalty. The Cardinal Secretary of State, in the name of Pope Francis, recently spoke of “the inalienable dignity of human life, in its immeasurable value”.
The Catholic Archbishop of Port of Spain, Archbishop Joseph Harris, was the latest Church leader to argue against the death penalty in an eloquent and powerful message at a conference held at the University of West Indies on 1 October. “As a churchman and a person of Faith”, he said, “I cannot endorse the violence perpetrated on individuals in the name of justice. Pope Francis teaches us very clearly that Faith and violence are incompatible”. There is no room for equivocation. The more faith leaders like Archbishop Joseph can speak out, the stronger the collective voice against the death penalty will be.