Death Penalty (India)

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Thursday 28th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

I join other hon. Members in congratulating the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell) on securing this debate. I also congratulate the signatories to the Kesri Lehar petition which has been extremely influential in securing the debate.

Many hon. Members have talked about the importance of this issue to their constituents of Punjabi origin, and that is certainly true for my home town of Bedford and for Kempston, but this issue affects the whole community in the United Kingdom. We should all embrace it as a matter of importance. I draw Members’ memories back to the part of the Olympic opening ceremony that celebrated all that is great about our open, multicultural society, when Tim Berners-Lee said, “This is for everyone”, and talked about the interconnectedness of modern society. One of the things that makes our country unique and so special is that we can draw on people’s experiences from their origins around the world, and it is right that this Parliament, the mother of Parliaments, should debate this issue today.

We debate the issue in a spirit of humility, because we are talking about the legislation and rules of another sovereign country, which is—as the hon. Gentleman said in his opening speech—the world’s largest democracy. We need to be extremely respectful and humble in the representations that we make here today, but we also need to carry forward determination and conviction from our own experiences of the death penalty in the UK, and the ways in which politicians over the ages here worked, on principle and for practical reasons, to seek the abolition of the death penalty. In that there is a message for modern Indian politicians.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point about being respectful of the sovereignty of other nations, but we can also point out that, according to Professor Steven Pinker, the professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard university, western Europe is now the safest place to live in history in terms of person-on-person violence and even war and interstate violence. That is in a society with the complete absence of the death penalty. It is worth pointing that out to other places in the world to encourage them to change, rather than demanding that they change.

[Richard Fuller]

The hon. Gentleman makes the point perhaps more eloquently than I could. This is a matter not just of principle for many hon. Members, but a matter of practical impact. The existence of the death penalty can exacerbate situations and stimulate other criminal activity as a response.

I wish to make a couple of points that perhaps go a bit further than the petition in making representations to our friends in India. Although a moratorium is desirable, the intent should really be outright abolition, because history teaches us that moratoriums are not always an effective long-term solution. As has already been mentioned, India has had a moratorium, and it has ended—the consequences of that remain to be seen. We have also had the experience of the United States, where the Supreme Court issued what was essentially a moratorium. That went away, and before George W. Bush became President he was one of the most excited and active executioners of people under the US criminal code when he was governor of Texas. There are pressures on politicians and the judiciary when there is still the option of ending the moratorium. Modern societies need to strive to achieve abolition if we are to accomplish both the in-principle benefits and the practical benefits of the elimination of the death penalty.

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[Richard Fuller]

I refer the hon. Gentleman to what has already been said about the situation in India with regard to rape. The broader point is that there are lessons for politicians of all countries about the possible use of the death penalty in political discourse. The hard-learned lessons in this country are that we end up with a more effective and fairer criminal justice system if we abolish the death penalty. There is no stopping point along the way to abolition that will ultimately provide the security of those two outcomes: there has to be outright abolition.

[Mr MacNeil]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way; he is being very kind. To back up his argument from history, again from Steven Pinker, we can draw on the example of England. Some 800 years ago, the death penalty was commonplace and there was a hangman’s hill in every village throughout the British Isles. An Englishman was 50 times more likely to be killed by a fellow Englishman in a society that had the death penalty than they are in the modern day when there is no death penalty.

[Richard Fuller]

That is an interesting statistic, which I am sure also pertains to Scotland.

Another point that I humbly submit for our friends in India to consider is that this issue shines a light on the general operation of the judicial system in India. Those who study the British empire—I have read only a few books on it—learn that the English judicial system is one of the gifts we gave to the world. I am sure we talk that up a lot, but there is a lot of truth in the fact that many people around the world see the British judicial system as a reliable and trusted friend when they are in conflict situations. There are issues relating to the Indian judicial system that exacerbate concerns about the existence of the death penalty. I have mentioned the implications for the mental health and well-being of people on death row. With the case load in Indian courts so backed up, what is it that says that a certain case should move forward or not? How are those decisions made? What is the due process in a system that finds itself not fully capable of dealing with its work load?

Constituents of mine who have had legal disputes in India have always made the point that they have had to go back to India to deal with them. Without putting too fine a point on it, sometimes that is because of issues to do with money in the criminal justice system. I have no idea whether that is true and certainly, of course, none of my constituents has been involved in any of that, but it is interesting that there is that question. Our friends in India, being part of a great hope for the world, need to address those issues. The petition shines a light on how the world will look on the decisions made regarding the death penalty in India as a result of those issues.

The Minister kindly responded to the question of what India moving forward with the death penalty would mean for UK relations in certain circumstances. He was right to talk about considering cases on an individual basis. However, if India became a more active proponent of the death penalty, that would have significant implications for how the UK would look at extraditing people to India. We do not want the death penalty to affect our relationship when there is so much that is positive that we want to talk about, and we do not want to have ongoing disputes on this issue. I therefore hope that the British Government would look very dimly on extraditing any person to India that might result in their being subject to the death penalty, and seek assurances that it would not be applied in any such cases.

I again thank the signatories to the petition. This issue may be of particular concern to our Sikh community, but it is a concern for all of us in this open United Kingdom and for all of us in Parliament. May we together send the message to our colleagues who sit in the Indian Parliament that on the issue of the death penalty it is often the politicians who have to lead public opinion, not the other way around? They should have the courage to halt executions immediately, and to step forward not just to reinstate a moratorium but to effect outright abolition.