When the Chinese courts sentenced two Tibetans to the death penalty recently (check out the BBC report here), an outcry arose immediately among the Tibetan community and has now gradually spread around the world. Both the Tibetan Youth Congress and Amnesty International have registered their protests against this unfair, inhuman, and brutal practice.
Amnesty International continues to be one of the agencies that makes public the grim statistics of judicial killing; many countries have their own branch of AI, such as Amnesty International USA. These are all carefully maintained websites that have devoted themselves to humanitarian causes around the globe, and if you haven't bookmarked them yet, you might think about doing so. Reading them on a regular basis will have a direct impact on your humanitarian practice, however you wish to define it.
Have a look at the following video that chronicles the Get on the Bus movement, sponsored by Amnesty International and supporting, among other issues, free speech in Tibet.
Grass-roots movements like Get on the Bus allow, for example, Irene Kahn, Secretary General of Amnesty International, to do her work (see a brief video statement by Kahn here) on a global scale. With these local initiatives in place, the balance between barbarism and humanitarianism (the two sides are always at war because they are two forces warring within the individual human psyche) can begin to shift ever so slightly toward human dignity and a respect for human life. In this campaign, the ongoing fate of capital punishment is a kind of yardstick on how we're faring as a compassionate and caring global village.
Several facts and figures regarding the death penalty that you might want to know (all taken from Amnesty International's report on the death penalty in 2008) are listed below. Call it a kind of statistical autobiography of the world's spirit:
- Fifty-nine countries have retained the death penalty for ordinary crimes. Here they are: Afghanistan, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Botswana, Burundi, Chad, China, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cuba, Dominica, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Guinea, Guyana, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lesotho, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nigeria, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Authority, Qatar, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saudi Arabia, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad And Tobago, Uganda, United Arab Emirates, United States Of America, Viet Nam, Yemen, Zimbabwe.
- Only 25 countries of those 59 listed above actually carried out an execution in 2008. This is seen as a sign that these countries are drifting away from this practice.
- A disproportionate number of sentences were handed down to the poor, minorities and members of racial, ethnic and religious communities in countries such as Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and USA.
- Regarding the United States: The current total number of defendants on state and federal death rows is 3,307, of whom 45% are white, 41.6% are black, and 11% are Latino/Latina. Over 98% of those on death row are male. The states with the largest death rows are California (662), Florida (399), Texas (367), and Pennsylvania (226).
- The big killers continue to be China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States.
- Paradoxically, Asia, the font of non-violent philosophy, leads the world in state-sponsored executions. More people were executed in Asia than in any other part of the world in 2008.
- China carried out more executions than the rest of the world put together.
So what can you do? Read the Amnesty International website. That's the first thing. If you're interested in Tibet, then you want to concentrate, for the time being, on human rights violations in China, and AI has a site for that. And if you're an American reading this blog, you need to be aware of the international perspective on America's own reputation in the human rights arena. Click here for more details.
It's a global issue.
