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Every month, Singapore executes three criminals. How does that square with the Commonwealth’s talk on human rights? CLAIRE BONELLO gets little out of secretary general Don McKinnon
The foreign press is not as enamoured of the Commonwealth shindig – whilst the local papers have been awash with CHOGM, the event hardly registered on the foreign radar. The British dailies picked up the story on Thursday. Only the supremely conservative Telegraph ran a piece about the Queen returning to the isle of happy memories.
Commonwealth secretary general Don McKinnon hopes this CHOGM will result equally happy memories for all participant countries and their citizens. To date, this has not been the case for those appealing for the commutation of the death sentence meted out to Van Tuong Nguyen by a Singaporean court.
The 23-year-old Australian, arrested at Singapore Changi airport with 400 grams of heroin. Convicted under the Misuse of Drugs Act, the law carries a mandatory death sentence. Anyone found guilty of trafficking more than 15 grams of heroin hangs.
Now, the youth who was once a boy scout will go to the gallows at dawn on Friday 2 December. His mother, twin brother and a growing lobby group are campaigning desperately for a last minute reprieve.
They are not getting much joy from Australian PM John Howard, who has declared that he will not be bringing the matter up with his Singaporean counterpart.
McKinnon is equally reluctant to make forthright declarations on this issue. Will the matter be brought up in any CHOGM forum? “The great thing about the CHOGM, especially with the leaders’ retreat format, is that they can bring up anything they want to. There is absolutely no restriction on what they discuss. Political leaders can benefit from this opportunity to communicate informally.”
That’s diplomat speak for “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
What are his personal views on the matter? “I feel that it would be inappropriate to express my personal views. But I do have views on the matter – I’ve worked in prisons and met a good number of criminals and murderers.” That non-sequitur aside, the question arises as to how effectively the Commonwealth, which McKinnon dubs the “network of networks” can deal with matters of the sort, or if it should even attempt to do so.
The Commonwealth is often lambasted for being a talking shop where there’s much chin-wagging but little else done. Those who subscribe to this point of view are deliberately refusing to recognise the nature of the organization. As McKinnon notes, “We have no battalions behind us, no huge chequebooks in hand, just the moral pressure which the Commonwealth can bring to bear on leaders of nations – nations which share common values.”
If the member nations really share these common values, they have a strange way of showing it. Among them there’s a divide which is not only digital. And the divisions are easily seen on the capital punishment front. Out of 54 states, 28 still have capital punishment on the statute books. Between 1991 and 2000 some 340 people have been hanged in Singapore making it the place with the highest number of executions per capita. How does this square with the Commonwealth commitment towards human rights?
For although the death penalty is not classified as an infringement of human rights, the trend towards its abolition as a form of punishment is evident. Many member states have ratified human rights conventions with reservations with regard to death penalty abolition. Which critics say rather diminishes the “common values” values argument.
During the last CHOGM session held in Nigeria, Amnesty International urged the Commonwealth to start turning human rights rhetoric into reality. Otherwise the organisation would continue to be viewed with indifference at best, and extreme scepticism at worst.
The Van Nguyen case might well be the one which shows whether these suggestions have been taken on board two years down the line.
cl.bon@nextgen.net.mt
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