Jan. 15
BULGARIA:
Libya's Parliament Urges Execution of Bulgarian Nurses, Compensation for
AIDS Victims
Bulgarias president said Friday circles in Libya tried to "politicise" a
case of 5 Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, who appeal death
sentences they were handed for allegedly causing an AIDS outbreak at a
childrens hospital.
Georgi Parvanov reacted to an earlier statement by Libya's parliament that
vowed to seek compensations from Bulgaria for the families of the infected
children and urged execution of the medics.
Speaking to the Bulgarian state radio during a visit to Brazil, Parvanov
described the statement as "an alarming signal."
"This is the latest proof that there are certain circles, who would like
to politicise the trial," the radio quoted Parvanov as saying.
"I'd like to express my and all Bulgarians' confidence that the court in
Libya will be independent," he added.
The nurses and the doctor are appealing at Libyas Supreme Court in Tripoli
death sentences a court in Benghazi handed them last May 6 on charges of
deliberately injecting 426 children at a local hospital with blood
contaminated with the HIV virus that causes AIDS. Libya says more than 40
children have developed AIDS and died.
"The pressure on the (Supreme) court is obviously enormous, which puts to
trial its morality and conscience," Trayan Markovski, a defence lawyer of
the Bulgarian nurses said referring to the parliamentary declaration.
Bulgaria has repeatedly rejected Libyan calls for compensations asserting
the medics are innocent. The court in Benghazi has ignored evidence by
international experts, who said the infection had started possibly back in
1994 because of bad hygiene and multiple use of syringes, while the
hospital hired the Bulgarians in March 1998.
"The Bulgarian institutions must continue their efforts to achieve a
quicker and a more fair trial whose outcome would confirm the innocence of
the Bulgarian citizens," Parvanov said.
Earlier in the day, the European Union top executive body, the European
Commission, issued a statement expressing concern about the fate of the
medics and urging Libya to free them, the AFP reported.
Sofia has rallied wide international support for its efforts to persuade
Libya reverse the convictions.
(source: Bulgarian News Network)
JAPAN:
Why Japan Still Has the Death Penalty
There is a place in the advanced industrial world where people are
regularly sentenced to death, and executed, for their crimes. Some of the
condemned deny their guilt -- and there are confirmed cases of mistakes in
sentencing. But government officials say the system delivers retribution
and deterrence fairly and efficiently.
This place is not Texas. It is Japan -- the only industrial democracy
other than our own that still regularly executes convicted murderers. In
2004, the Japanese conducted 2 executions by hanging, the sole method
employed there. In some years, the rate is double or triple that. This is
nowhere near the rate in the United States, where 59 convicted murderers
were put to death in 2004. But there are many more murders in the United
States than in Japan, and our population is 295 million people compared to
Japan's 127 million. When you adjust for those facts, Japan has recently
been about as likely as Texas and Virginia to sentence killers to death.
Covering the Supreme Court, which has the final say in every capital case,
I have gotten used to seeing the United States as a loner on this issue.
The European Union, Canada, South Africa and a growing portion of Latin
America have abolished the death penalty. The United States regularly
absorbs condemnation from human rights organizations because it hasn't.
But the United States is joined in continuing the practice by an
officially pacifist country that many Americans think of as the cradle of
Pikachu and Hello Kitty. How come? My best guess, based on reporting I did
there this past summer: Basically, Japan's leaders are giving their people
what they want.
To be sure, democracy in Japan is not usually thought of as highly
responsive. Since World War II, Japan's government has been dominated by a
single party, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which is closely allied
with unelected bureaucrats who make policy behind the scenes. The
government forbids the release of basic information about the death
penalty, so public opinion is poorly informed. Executions are conducted in
secret; as former justice minister Hideo Usui told me, they are scheduled
during parliamentary recesses, so as to deprive opposition politicians of
any opportunity "to cause a big public row over the death penalty."
Still, not even capital punishment's opponents in Japan question the basic
validity of a survey conducted by the government in 1999, which found that
79.3 percent of the public backs the death penalty. In 34 polls taken
between 1953 and 1999, abolition of capital punishment has never garnered
a majority. Letters published in the Japanese press reflect the
surprisingly intense feelings behind the polls. "I believe execution is
the best punishment for felons, especially murderers," a citizen named
Hajime Ishi wrote to the Yomiuri Shimbun in July 2003. "Controversial as
my opinion may be, I would like to see all murderers -- regardless of
their age, gender and nationality -- put to death." In a 2003 trial, a
Tokyo prosecutor made his case for a death sentence by handing the judge a
petition signed by 76,000 people.
Japanese frequently invoke culture to account for these sentiments. One
theory, of which I heard several variants, is that the Japanese,
group-oriented and with ancestral roots in village life, have a long
tradition of isolating and eliminating evildoers. Authoritarian tenets of
Confucianism, a Chinese import, may have reinforced this. Several people
told me that Japanese Buddhism, too, provides support for capital
punishment. "A basic teaching is retribution," says Tomoko Sasaki, a
former member of the Diet (Japan's parliament), an ex-prosecutor and a
leading advocate of the death penalty in the LDP. "If someone evil does
something bad, he has to atone with his own life. If you take a life, you
have to give your own."
But cultural norms, though powerful, are not immutable; capital punishment
has ebbed and flowed in Japan, both historically and in modern times.
Buddhism, famously a nonjudgmental, nonviolent doctrine, can easily be
interpreted as incompatible with the death penalty. And a ban on capital
punishment prevailed in Japan during the Heian Era (794 A.D. to 1185
A.D.), which coincided with Buddhism's introduction to the country from
China. One of the country's most prominent anti-capital punishment
activists since the war, the late Tairyu Furukawa, was a Buddhist priest.
During the early '90s, Megumu Sato, a former Buddhist priest serving as
minister of justice, refused to sign execution orders for the year he was
in office, citing his religious beliefs.
Sato was 1 of 4 ministers who served during a 40-month de facto moratorium
on executions that began in November 1989 and ended in March 1993. The
moratorium followed a period of increasing concern about capital
punishment, both inside and outside the Japanese government. The key
events were the exonerations during the 1980s of 4 death-row prisoners,
all of whom had been sentenced to hang in the chaotic period just after
World War II and then spent years pursuing appeals.
The exonerations were deeply embarrassing to the powerful Ministry of
Justice, which handles all criminal prosecutions in Japan. Ministry
officials sincerely believe that such miscarriages of justice are all but
impossible under the Japanese system, because prosecutors rarely bring
charges unless the defendant confesses and only seek the death penalty in
selected cases involving multiple victims, or where murder is combined
with rape or robbery. But the exonerations forced the country to
acknowledge that several men had been sentenced to death based on
confessions squeezed out of them in prolonged custody, that the police had
mishandled key evidence -- and that such practices have not disappeared.
Amid the soul-searching, the anti-death penalty movement, traditionally
marginal, gained strength and coalesced into an umbrella organization
known as Forum 90, the first of its kind in modern Japan.
Yet, just as death-row exonerations based on DNA evidence have dented but
not overturned the basic consensus in favor of the death penalty in the
United States, the pro-death penalty consensus in Japan proved resilient.
In time, concerns about crime and violence came to trump concerns about
the rights of defendants. After an internal review of the exonerations,
which concluded mainly that authorities needed to do a better job of
ensuring truthful confessions, the Ministry of Justice resumed executions
in March 1993.
Then, on March 20, 1995, a cult known as Aum Shinrikyo released nerve gas
in the Tokyo subway, killing 12 people and injuring thousands. Citizens
demanded that the perpetrators pay with their lives, and the authorities
responded. "Politicians listen to voters' views," Yuji Ogawara, a lawyer
who represents capital defendants, told me. "In that sense, it has become
more difficult to talk about abolishing the death penalty since Aum. It
was a watershed event." Of the 50 death sentences issued between 1999 and
2002, nine went to Aum conspirators. The cult's founder, Shoko Asahara,
was sentenced to death last year.
Something else happened in the mid-1990s: street crime rose. Japan is
still much safer than America. But what Japanese notice is that it is less
safe than it used to be. According to the government, reported crimes
registered a postwar high for six consecutive years between 1996 and 2002
before leveling off in 2003. Causes include Japan's steep and socially
disruptive economic downturn in the '90s, as well as post-Cold War freedom
of movement among Japan, Russia and China, which brought some foreign gang
activity to Japan's shores. While the number of murders hasn't risen
rapidly, several brutal and highly publicized killings -- including a
massacre of 8 schoolchildren in 2001 -- fed the public's growing sense of
insecurity.
Whereas 1990 saw the founding of Forum 90, 1999 marked the founding of the
National Association of Crime Victims and Surviving Families, an
influential pro-death penalty lobby. Its founder, Isao Okamura, is a
lawyer and former vice chairman of the Japan Federation of Bar
Associations, which advocates a moratorium on executions and greater legal
protections for death row inmates. But after Okamura's wife was brutally
stabbed to death in 1997, his views hardened.
The courts, which had led the way in re-examining capital punishment two
decades earlier, now were following the public mood. On Dec. 10, 1999,
Japan's Supreme Court overturned the life sentence imposed on a man
convicted of robbery and murder in Hiroshima prefecture. It was the first
time since 1983 that the Supreme Court had recommended that a life
sentence be replaced with death. This decision had a "great influence" on
trial judges, says Satoru Shinomiya, a law professor at Waseda University
in Tokyo. It has been followed by several other rulings in which appeals
courts have granted prosecution requests to overturn life sentences in
favor of the death penalty. (Such requests are not allowed in the United
States.)
Judges sentenced one person to death in 1992 (there are no jury trials in
Japan); they sentenced 18 people to death in 2002. There are currently 60
people on death row whose sentences have been finalized, an increase of 10
from 1999 and more than double the level, 24, of 1986. Meanwhile, a bill
calling for a 3-year moratorium on executions and a top-to-bottom review
of the capital punishment system was shelved last year by its sponsors in
the Diet, because of its poor prospects for success.
To expect Japan to abolish the death penalty through normal democratic
processes is to expect it to do something that Europe itself did not
exactly accomplish. Germany and Italy got rid of the death penalty
immediately after World War II, when the drafters of their new
constitutions banned it. (Japan's 1946 constitution, promulgated under
U.S. occupying authorities who were also hanging Japanese war criminals,
bans "cruel" punishments; in 1948, the Japanese Supreme Court ruled that
the death penalty was not cruel.) In France, then-president Francois
Mitterrand abolished the death penalty by decree in 1981; most French
citizens supported it, but Mitterrand imposed his will thanks to the power
of the French presidency, which has no equivalent in consensus-oriented
Japan. Even now, large percentages in most European nations favor the
death penalty, according to polls. More countries continue to abolish it
to meet a condition of inclusion in the European Union. Poland, for
example, abolished the death penalty in 1997, despite surveys showing that
more than 60 percent of Poles wanted to keep it.
But opponents of the death penalty in Japan, international and domestic,
have no such leverage. Europe is not about to slap economic sanctions on
the world's 2nd-largest economy. The strongest punishment threatened so
far is revocation of Japan's observer status on the Council of Europe, a
human rights organization made up of representatives from 44 governments
-- and the council has hesitated to impose even that. For Japanese
officials, resistance to foreign critics of the death penalty may be a
relatively cost-free way to savor a little old-fashioned national
sovereignty. "We believe that the decision whether to keep or abolish the
death penalty should be the decision of each individual country, and
should be based on the public sentiment of each country, and the crime
situation in each country," says Hideo Takasaki, a senior official of the
Ministry of Justice's criminal affairs bureau.
Unless something leads Tokyo to change that attitude, the United States
won't be totally isolated. At least on this one issue, in these 2
countries, East meets West.
(source: Washington Post; Charles Lane covers the Supreme Court for The
Washington Post. He spent the past summer studying the Japanese criminal
justice system on a fellowship from the Japan Society)
