The country that wants to promote world peace and human rights executes its 1000 person since the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976. Now I appreciate that certain crimes are so heinous that deserve a severe punishment surely nothing is severe enough to take a life? Maybe if we take it that we should give an eye for an eye then if we are correct in the assumption that if someone kills then they should die if convicted, but is this not a phalisy? Would it not be better to educate and also make people face up to their responsibilities and to come to terms with the fact that they killed. Does it mean that the person who injects in this case the lethal injection is in fact killing and therefore should also be punished even if that person is in fact only following the orders of a supreme court or judge? What is the mental capacity of the person who admits the final dose of poison into the convicts body? How can they face the world day after day. Is it fair to put this person through such mental torture, not to mention the mental torture of the person who is about to die. If this person was an animal, and some might argue that these people are nothing but animals and biologically they would be correct for we are all animals, then there would be a public outcry. Look at what happened with fox hunting in the UK or the culling of seals, whales, tigers, the list goes on. We go out of our way to protect animals whereas we seem to go in completely the opposite direction where mankind is concerned. This does not only extend to capital punishment but one could also use climate change as being a way of killing man.
But this does not address the human rights issues involved in taking an eye for an eye. We are told that we live in a civilised society but where does civility start and abuse end? At the moment it seems as if he who has the loudest voice, the most money, the greatest military threat is at liberty to condemn others for their breaches of human rights whilst at the same time making sure that they continue with threes. This is synonymous with the general attitude, we have the reasons for the war in Iraq and the weapons of mass destruction, the use of chemical weapons, to uphold democracy and to put an end to human rights violations whilst at the same time using chemical weapons against this so called enemy, having one of the most undemocratic systems in the world where even if one person has more votes than the other the other still wins and by their use of the death penalty show that they have as many human rights violations as anyone else in the world that they decry, and I haven't even mention the recent discovery of CIA detention camps in Europe of the people who have been locked up in Guantanamo Bay for over 3 years without charge.
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