17 January 2001
CWNews.com
NEW DELHI, Jan. 17, 01 – A prominent human rights organization in Asia has urged the federal constitution review committee to repeal capital punishment in India.
In a statement released today, the New Delhi-based South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center (SAHRDC) said that it has presented a 40-page document to the National Commission for the Review of the Working of the Constitution (NCRWC) highlighting the growing demand worldwide for doing away with the death penalty.
“It is increasingly recognized that the death penalty has no place in a democratic and civilized society. As the international community’s consensus against the death penalty grows, India is becoming increasingly isolated in its commitment to the death penalty,” said the SAHRDC statement.
Though the Indian Supreme Court has ruled that the death sentence is to be ordered only in the “rarest of rare cases,” capital punishment is included as a penalty in several laws such as the Indian Penal Code, penalty provisions of national security legislation, and anti-narcotics legislation.
SAHRDC executive director Ravi Nair said that the death penalty is “bad in taste and in law. It is an offense to human dignity.” It is for the same reason, Nair said, that civil rights groups have “joined hands with church organizations in demanding abolition of the death penalty.”
SAHRDC has taken up the issue seriously as the Constitution Review Committee– appointed by the federal government to review the working of the Indian constitution for the last 50 years– provides a “golden opportunity” for concerned people to take their demands “effectively” to the law makers, he added.