Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/1999-11-18-Speech-4-214"
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"en.19991118.11.4-214"2
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"Mr President, I would like to tell you briefly that I belong to a generation which was fortunate not to live through the massacre of Algerians in Paris in 1961, not to experience, on 9 November 1938
or the start of Jewish persecution in various European countries and fortunate, above, all to see the end of apartheid in South Africa. If, at every stage along the way, there are people who rose up and said, “Never again”, it is quite simply because they are convinced that there is nothing worse than physical harm inflicted on individuals.
This founding principle of Europe is today being challenged, indeed, by the application of the death penalty in a considerable number of places throughout the world. China, the self-styled democratic Republic of the Congo, the United States and Iran have the sad record of coming at the top of the list of the countries which apply the death sentence. According to Amnesty International, there are 3,500 prisoners waiting for execution in the United States, where 68 prisoners were executed last year. In these countries, the right of life or death over prisoners is all the more intolerable in the light of the ridiculously limited budgets allocated to crime prevention policies and social matters. I prefer to think that, as Victor Hugo said, to close one prison, it is enough to open one more school. There is absolutely no doubt that the seventeen years that Mumia Abu-Jamal has just spent rotting on death row following a travesty of justice are linked to the fact that he is black, to his fight against institutional racism, to the freedom of thought which this journalist practised by having the courage to denounce the corruption prevailing in the ranks of the Philadelphia police. In the same way, Iran, which executed 66 people last year, would have us believe that the dozens of students arrested and the 13 Jews, were spies.
The mobilisation of international opinion, as we have seen, prevented the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal, scheduled for 2 December. But, for the time being, there has only been a stay of execution. We must now seek to have the order of execution revoked definitively. We must widen and intensify our pressure on these countries and hit them where it hurts. It is important that European businesses should refuse to invest in the states of the United States or anywhere else in the world where the death penalty continues to be applied. The Member States of the European Union must refuse to extradite any person to a country where it is known that their death sentence is automatically programmed as soon as they set foot there. Demanding the immediate and unconditional abolition of capital punishment throughout the entire world today does not just mean promoting human dignity but also validating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Mr President, I belong to a generation which thinks that conventions against torture and discrimination should not be signed just for the fun of it."@en1
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