What happens in the US with regard to capital punishment will be crucial for its abolition world-wide, according to a UN consultant on the death penalty.
He said he hoped that the tragic and painful events of last week, and the understandable anxiety and anger they have generated, do not augur a setback for the abolition of the death penalty both in the US and world-wide.
Prof Roger Hood, director of the Centre for Criminological Research in Oxford, was speaking last night at the first annual lecture of the UCD Law Faculty's Institute for Criminology. He told The Irish Times he hoped that, if the US did apprehend Osama bin Laden and find him guilty of responsibility for last week's attacks, it would refrain from imposing the death penalty.
"Creating martyrs is counterproductive, as Ireland's history shows," he said.
He said that when there was a debate in the UK about reintroducing the death penalty for terrorist offences in the 1970s and 1980s this argument played an important part in the government's deciding against it.
He praised the vote in the referendum earlier this year that made the death penalty unconstitutional in Ireland as "a vote that gave the lie to the widespread belief that everywhere there is popular support for the death penalty."
American public opinion is not intractable on the subject, he told his audience last night. "It appears to vary according to whether people believe that it is being carried out fairly and only against those who really deserve it," he said.
"In my view it needs the United States Supreme Court, which has so far taken a very isolationist stance in its interpretation of human rights as regards capital punishment, to take a more internationalist view of what does and does not constitute an abuse of human rights," he said. At the moment it even allowed 25 states to execute persons aged 16 or 17 at the time of the offence, although this was condemned by the UN and has even been outlawed by China.
In many countries where the death penalty still existed its scope was very wide, he said, and in the past 20 years capital statutes had actually been extended in a large number of Middle Eastern countries, notably for the production and trafficking of drugs. China still retained the death penalty for at least 68 offences.