CANBERRA, Australia—Papua New Guinea is looking at abandoning the death penalty for serious crimes, wary of a growing international backlash against the use of capital punishment in neighboring Indonesia, Prime Minister Peter O’Neill said Tuesday.
Almost two years after Papua New Guinea reinstated the death penalty to try to tackle graft and lawlessness deterring overseas investment in the country, Mr. O’Neill said growing criticism of Indonesia over the execution of foreign drug convicts from Brazil and the Netherlands, and potentially two from Australia, had triggered a government rethink.
“We certainly do not want to be seen as a country that is actively promoting the death penalty as a means of enforcing law and order in the country,” Mr. O’Neill told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. “We are actively debating the death penalty issue in the government caucuses at present and there may be some need for review.”
Following a series of gruesome witch-killings and gang rapes, the PNG parliament voted in May 2013 to reactivate moribund death-penalty laws, unused since 1954, to make murder, rape and robbery punishable by measures ranging from hanging to a firing squad, as well as “medical” asphyxiation.
At the time Mr. O’Neill, whose country is forecast this year to be among the world’s fastest-growing on the back of booming liquefied natural-gas exports, was trying to lure resource investment with a promise of improved law and order. The new laws, the government said, would extend capital punishment to serious corruption worth more than $4.5 million.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, March 10, 2015
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