Death Penalty in Asia-Pacific

Kerobokan Jail, Indonesia

The death penalty combined with unfair trials is a hallmark of the justice system in far too many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, with 14 countries executing more people than all the rest of the world combined.

Those 14 countries - including China, Pakistan, India and Japan - cover 95 per cent of the region's population, though just a minority of the 41 countries. (India hasn't executed anyone since 2004, but nearly 400 people are believed to be on death row.)

A report from an anti-death-penalty group in Asia makes for bleak reading. Forced confessions are a regular feature of death-penalty cases in Afghanistan, China, Japan, India and Indonesia, says the Anti-Death Penalty Asia Network, which formed in 2006, with civil-society members in 23 countries. A confession may produce a conviction and a death sentence even in the absence of other evidence. Access to lawyers is spotty and in some countries it is not even possible to appeal a death sentence or conviction.

The positive news is that, while the number of abolitionist countries, at 17, is small, another nine countries have not executed anyone for at least a decade, joining an international trend against the death penalty. Singapore, once the world's per-capita leader in executions, did not execute anyone in 2010, and just 14 in the previous three years, according to government figures. But two countries, Thailand and Taiwan, have gone back on their stated goals of abolition.

The death penalty is barbaric at the best of times; but when it is applied in an unfair justice system in which the right to counsel barely exists, in which the judiciary is not independent from government, in which torture is rife, the innocent are at high risk of being put to death. It is a stain on any country in which it exists, and on the region as a whole.

Source: The Globe and Mail, December 27, 2011