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| Europe |
| In Europe, it's East vs. West on the death penalty |
| 2006-11-19 |
| The European Union recoiled when an Iraqi court sentenced Saddam Hussein to death earlier this month. Not even Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain wants to see the deposed dictator with a rope around his neck. Yet many people in Central and Eastern Europe applauded the death sentence. Some of them pine for the capital punishment that they had to give up to join the European club. The Czech Republic's right-wing prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, welcomed the Hussein sentence, calling it "an act of justice" and a warning to other dictators. President Lech Kaczynski of Poland called it "the only possible outcome." A former justice minister of Slovakia, Daniel Lipsic, criticized his country for pandering to the European Union in opposing the Iraqi decision. A majority of the public in all three countries supports reintroducing the death penalty. Some homicides tend to be particularly heinous in eastern Europe, and the police is seen as inept or powerless. One thing the communists got right is their low tolerance for crime (crime not sponsored by them, of course). Now the cops have to recite a multitude of things before drawing their gun, i.e, give multiple warnings, and warn bad guys of oncoming bullets! etc. Most Central and Eastern European governments echoed the official European position, particularly those that have not yet joined the European Union. Croatia's president, Stjepan Mesic, whose country hopes to join soon, said he opposed capital punishment. Even in Ukraine, which a decade ago had the highest execution rate in Europe, the government said that the death penalty was wrong, while adding it respected Iraq's sovereignty in sentencing Mr. Hussein. But the official pronouncements masked a deeper debate rooted in the divergent histories that Europe experienced in the wake of World War II. Those countries that gave birth to fascism were the first to reject the death penalty: Italy abolished it for all but wartime crimes in 1948, and Germany for all crimes in 1949. Other Western Europeans were slower to ban it, though they all eventually did. For example, France's last execution, by guillotine, was in 1977. ...most probably in Algeria. Esquire magazine did a thing about what it feels like to be a guillotine operator. It was a family affair, apparently. But those countries that fell under Soviet domination after the war did not take up that debate, even if their societies had once banned the death penalty. (Romania, for example, first abolished it in 1864 and didn't reinstate it until 1936.) In the Soviet satellites, a wide range of offenses were punishable by death, not only economic crimes but anything that could be construed as threatening the stability of the state. The ideological climate then subordinated individual rights to the collective "good." Cynical as that principle might have been, it left a deep mark that has yet to disappear. With the collapse of Communism and the advent of sometimes chaotic Western liberalism, a yearning for order translated into a nostalgia, of sorts, for the days when criminals paid the ultimate price. That's exactly right. "The transition to democratic societies created a state of uncertainty and fear," said Klaus Rogall, a death penalty expert at the Free University in Berlin. Even today, he noted, support for capital punishment remains high in the former East Germany, while the idea is widely abhorred in the former West Germany. "The demand for the death penalty is based on a desire for protection," he said. ...or more precisely, based on the observation that EU cops are powerless wimps. The criminals know this, btw. Public support for the death penalty was 60 percent in Eastern Europe on the eve of the millennium, according to a Gallup poll, compared with 60 percent against in Western Europe. Surveys in Poland show 70 percent support for capital punishment today. While almost all these states (Belarus is the exception) abolished the death penalty to join the Council of Europe, a prerequisite for joining the European Union, politicians have begun to recognize public opinion. Hungary's former prime minister and leader of its center-right opposition, Viktor Orban, called on Europe to lift its ban. His announcement came after eight people died in a Hungarian bank robbery - and after his party lost national elections. Earlier this year, President Kaczynski of Poland made headlines by calling for a debate on the restoration of the death penalty in his country and throughout Europe. "Countries that give up this penalty award an unimaginable advantage to the criminal over his victim, the advantage of life over death," Mr. Kaczynski said in July. His coalition partner, the far-right League of Polish Families, wants to change the country's penal code so that pedophiles convicted of murder would face execution. The guardians of Europe's carefully forged humanitarian ideals have bristled at such talk, but dismiss it as nothing more than political gamesmanship. "We are aware of the debate in some member states, but we are not particularly worried," said Riccardo Mosca, a spokesman for the European Commission office in charge of justice, freedom and security issues. He noted that any country that reinstated capital punishment would face potential sanctions, if not expulsion. "The European Union is quite solid," he said. Unlikely. The EU as it exists today is a farce and it will always be on the brink of falling apart. That's unfortunate, because a strong, united Europe might actually be a good thing. All of the politicians pronouncing their desire for a return of capital punishment admit as much. "I am for restoring the death penalty, but I am aware that presently, due to the Protocol to the Convention of Human Rights, this would be impossible," said Krzysztof Bosak, a League of Polish Families member of Parliament. The protocol is an agreement that all states must ratify before joining the union. There are always a few who would like to leave the EU for whatever reason (usually nationalism or longing for the good old commie days). It seems they discovered an out: Push the death penalty issue. The support is there. I get a feeling they will always stir this debate to push through their agenda, if they can get enough seats in the government. But few of these countries had a public debate about the death penalty before banning it to satisfy the European Union, so no popular consensus was reached. "What the Council of Europe did was to exercise the coercive powers they had over these young, fragile, emerging democracies who all wanted to join the big club of the Council of Europe with a view to joining the economic club of the E.U. in the future," said Peter Hodgkinson, head of the Center for Capital Punishment Studies at the University of Westminster in London. "They would have signed anything." And they did. Luckily, joing the EU has been mainly a good thing economically. The dark scenarios never emerged. Such a debate elsewhere in Europe convinced most of the intelligentsia that the punishment was not effective. Now, while there are periodic surges of support for the death penalty - usually after some particularly heinous crime - only fringe politicians dare call for its return. But in countries lacking such a debate, Mr. Hodgkinson argued, there is a chance that people who support putting murderers to death may turn to "extrajudicial" killings in response to rising crime, as happened in Albania in the 1990s when it was on the road to banning capital punishment. "To abolish the death penalty, that's hardly sustainable," Goethe wrote in 1829. "If that happens, we will call it back every now and then." Goethe wrote that? Surprised. |
| Posted by:Slereper Ulosing9249 |
| #2 The dark scenarios never emerged, yet. But as soon as it would be apparent that Islamists are taking over just one country, E. Europeans would be backing out of EU lickety split. My crystal ball sez within 6 years. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2006-11-19 20:10 |
| #1 based on the observation that EU cops are powerless wimps Oops. I have to take that back. It's the laws and rules of engagement that make the cops powerless. The guys and gals in uniform are not wimps. In fact, the anti-terrorist units are top notch in eastern Europe (operating under different rules of course). I've seen airport security in action one time in an eastern European country and I was impressed. |
| Posted by: Slereper Ulosing9249 2006-11-19 16:52 |