By Bill W. Cooper
The Civil Society Human Rights Advocacy Platform of Liberia (CSHRAPL) has intensified its campaign to increase advocacy in support to abolish death penalty in Liberia.
Speaking at a daylong regional consultation and public outreach to increase support for the abolition of death penalty in Liberia, the Secretary General of the Platform, Adama Dempster, said there is no dignity in taking away the life of any person.
He also described as inhumane and cruel treatment to take away a life of a person while enforcing another crime, and noted, “You don’t use crime to solve crime and it is not in any way a means of solving problems.”
Dempster stressed that it is about time that the government put behind itself a number of things and convinced the world in order to qualify Liberia for a seat at the United Nations Security Council.
According to him, as part of said drive, the abolition of death penalty by the government will be a great boost and a key attributing factor to push its case in the wake of such global campaign.
He indicated that Liberia needs to make progress and keep moving forward in its human rights campaign, and intoned, “Keeping the death penalty on the books and not applying it does not give any good signal about Liberia on the international stage.”
Dempster maintained that death penalty has far reaching consequences, thus re-emphasizing that putting people to death for crimes committed is irreversible.
He encouraged the government to do the needful and signed the document through the Legislature as already done by neighboring Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissue, among others.
Dempster wondered what happens if you take away the life of a person and later on find out that the person was innocent of the crime, making the case of miscarriage of justice.
e named discrimination, ineffectiveness, human rights violation and cost as negative issues associated with death penalty, and narrated that most of the people who were placed under death penalty were or are people who are under the marginalized group.
He then argued that the State that is under obligation to protect the rights of the people can’t be the same one taking away precious lives that they did not give, and named the lack of convincing evidence to warrant death penalty for people as issues associated with ineffectiveness.
Dempster pointed out that trauma is another attributing factor which has huge psychological impact on the victim and family in general and thereby pledged his commitment to continue the awareness and education to the public nationwide on the need to abolish death penalty in Liberia.
“We will create the necessary awareness to educate our people and erase the negative public perception, we will recommend policies, gather legal advice and collaborate as much as possible in order to ensure a good human right standing with the government and the country in general,” he added.
Earlier, both the Director of the Human Rights Department Director at the Ministry of Justice, Kutaka D. Togbah and the Executive Director at the Independent National Commission on Human Rights (INCHR) Urais Teh Pour, shared their thoughts on the significance of abolishing death penalty in Liberia.
Kutaka expressed the government’s willingness to achieving such key milestone and informed the gathering of the government’s progress made towards such campaign.
Pour highlighted the achievement of other countries that have so far abolished death penalty indicating that Liberia can also do the same for the betterment of the nation and its people.
