Life
Caribbean countries urged to impose moratorium on capital punishment
“For example, without going so far as to abolish the death penalty, the American Convention imposes restrictions designed to delimit strictly its application and scope, in order to reduce the application of the penalty to bring about its gradual disappearance.
“In this regard, the IACHR notes that there exists a global tendency towards the abolition of the death penalty that makes itself evident in the recent developments in this matter at the United Nations, regional systems for the protection of human rights and in international criminal law.”
In the report, the Commission highlights some advances related to the imposition of the death penalty in the region in recent years. Of particular importance have been the advances related to the mandatory imposition of the death penalty, that is, when this is imposed after a conviction for a crime without the opportunity for presenting or considering mitigating circumstances.
As a consequence of the development of inter-American standards that established that the death penalty contravenes the American Convention and the American Declaration, as well as of the interaction between the inter-American organs and the judicial bodies of the Commonwealth Caribbean, among other factors, there has been progress in the elimination of the mandatory aspect of the death penalty in the majority of the countries of the Caribbean.
The IACHR, an autonomous body of the OAS, said it expects that additional progress will be made in this direction until its repeal in all the countries of the region. -CMC
