June 2, 2004
TAJIKISTAN:
Tajik Lower House Passes Moratorium On Death Penalty
Tajikistan's lower house of parliament has unanimously adopted a
moratorium on the death penalty.
The lower house, the Majlisi Namoyandagon, set no end date for the
moratorium, which is to take effect immediately after becoming law. The
bill sets the maximum sentence for a crime at 25 years in prison.
The moratorium must still be approved by the upper house of parliament,
which is considered a formality, and must be signed by President Emomali
Rakhmonov, who proposed the moratorium in April.
However, parliamentarian Shermahmad Shoev said the courts are already
abiding by the moritorium.
"Keeping in mind the experience of most of the countries in the world that
have abolished or suspended this kind of punishment, Tajikistan has also
chosen this path," Shoev said. "In Tajikistan, the death sentence will be
not carried out anymore and this kind of punishment has been already
suspended [in the courts]."
Last year, Rakhmonov reduced the number of crimes punishable by death from
15 to five and revoked its use against women and minors.
Amnesty International has strongly criticized the death penalty in
Tajikistan, but the number of executions carried out in the Central Asian
country is unknown.
(source: Agence France-Presse)
CANADA:
Harper's crime package
Conservative Leader Stephen Harper is proposing to erase the liberal tinge
from Canada's justice system. A three-strikes-and-you're-out law, greater
recourse to jail and less to house arrest, and an end to statutory release
are tough without being extreme.
Wisely, he has steered clear of capital punishment. The state-sanctioned
killing of convicted killers is pointless and destructive; another debate
would achieve nothing. Instead, he proposes to abolish the faint hope
clause, which lets convicted killers apply to a jury for permission to seek
parole after 15 years, rather than the 25 they would otherwise have to wait
when given a life sentence for killing.
That is just one part of Mr. Harper's attempt to take on a justice system
that conservatives have portrayed as more concerned about criminals than
victims since the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms took effect.
His simplest proposals are to scrap the federal gun registry and use the
savings to hire more RCMP officers and expand the federal sex-offender
registry recently created by the Liberal government. The gun registry has
been a colossal failure. Its net cost was initially projected to be
$2-million; by 2005, it is expected to have cost $1-billion. The savings
would be spent in part to try to stop the flow of smuggled guns over the
U.S. border. Good. As for the sex-offender registry, Mr. Harper would need
provincial consent for his changes.
The toughest plank may be his three-strikes proposal. Anyone who committed
three violent crimes or three sexual offences would automatically be
declared a dangerous offender. In practice, this would mean at least seven
years in jail before the first parole review was held (as the current law
provides for); another review would be held every two years after that.
This is not the Draconian law of California, where a third felony -- say,
stealing a few videotapes -- can land someone in jail for life. But Canada
has a flexible set of responses to repeat criminals: both a
dangerous-offender law and a long-term offender designation, which allows
for intensive monitoring for 10 years after a jail term ends. The deterrent
value of Mr. Harper's more rigid response is unclear.
In abolishing statutory release (near-automatic freedom after two-thirds of
a jail sentence), Mr. Harper would add an undetermined cost to the system,
largely for symbolic value. He would also insist on jail instead of house
arrest for serious or violent crimes, sex offences or major drug
trafficking. There have been some misguided uses of house arrest. Clearer
direction to judges would be a good idea.
Whether Mr. Harper's reforms would cause the already declining national
crime rate to drop any faster is an open question. As well, he hasn't yet
provided an estimate of how much all this would cost. But the proposals are
smart enough to merit a thorough debate.
(source: Comment, Globe and Mail)
