November 2005

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Human Rights and Victim Justice

Renny Cushing is the Executive Director and Susannah Sheffer is the staff writer of Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights Membership is open to all victims' family members who oppose the death penalty in all cases. MVFHR, 2161 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge MA 02140; 617/491-9600; www.murdervictimsfamilies.org.

Is the death penalty such a clear violation of human rights that it should be prohibited even if some nations want to practice it, or is the death penalty simply a criminal sanction that countries should be allowed to impose if they believe it is effective?

Outside South Bay Prison in Massachusetts © Skip Schiel.

This was the heart of the debate among the representatives of 53 countries attending the annual meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland this past April. Representatives from some of the countries -- the United States among them -- argued that the death penalty is not an issue the international community should take up, and that individual countries should have the right to retain it.

In the end, the Commission passed a resolution condemning the death penalty and urging countries to abolish it. The US was among the 17 countries voting against the resolution.

Clearly there is not yet a consensus, either worldwide, or, certainly, within the US, that executions are violations of human rights. But, increasingly, those in the death penalty abolition movement are coming to believe that it is useful to frame the death penalty as a human rights issue rather than as a criminal justice issue. If we argue that executions violate human rights, then it is harder for those who support the death penalty to claim that countries that want to retain it should be allowed to do so. After all, human rights, by definition, are not for governments to extend or deny; they transcend political boundaries and political concerns. If the death penalty is a violation of human rights, then it has no place in society no matter what form of government or criminal justice system a nation has.

It seems simple enough to assert that executions violate Articles 3 and 5 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights -- the right to life, and the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment or treatment. Yet this assertion by itself may not be enough to sway people toward abolition. In addition to seeing the death penalty as a criminal sanction that ought to be available, many people believe that imposing the death penalty is a way of achieving justice for victims.

The "victims' rights" movement has raised awareness of the fact that victims too are stakeholders in the criminal justice process, and victims' rights laws -- which now exist in most states -- establish that victims should be informed, present, and heard at critical stages during that process, and should be treated with compassion, respect, and dignity. The voices of those who have lost loved ones to homicide have a great deal of power in the death penalty debate. The long-time death penalty abolitionists who formed the organization Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights in 2004 recognized this power and added to it the belief that highlighting the link between victims' rights and human rights will help move us toward abolition.

It's interesting to remember that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document that sets forth the most basic principles regarding the value of human life and the way human beings ought to treat one another, was inspired by victims, demanded by victims. It grew out of the suffering of millions of civilians murdered under the brutal regimes of the Second World War, and its adoption on December 10, 1948 was a way to honor the loss of these lives by asserting that such violations are neither moral nor permissible under any nation or regime.

Prisoner at MCI-Framingham, Massachusetts, 1993. © Michael Jacobson-Hardy.

In more recent times, however, it has sometimes seemed as though the victims' rights movement and the human rights -- or death penalty abolition -- movements are speaking different languages. Historically, the victims' movement has asserted that every human life has value and that the taking of any one life by murder represents a theft whose impact will be felt forever. Victims' rights are, therefore, a way of trying to counterbalance that original violation with a reassertion of human dignity. Historically, the death penalty abolition movement has recognized that every human life has value and that the taking of any one life by the state replicates the very violation it is supposedly designed to redress. These are in fact both human rights claims, yet abolitionists and victims' rights advocates often fail to recognize these commonalities or to internalize each other's perspectives.

For MVFHR, both the death penalty and individual murder are violations of fundamental human rights. We believe that those who are outraged when the state kills should be equally outraged when an individual kills, and should therefore make a real effort to understand the effects of murder and to consider and incorporate the victim's perspective into their work. We believe that those who are outraged by an individual murder should likewise be outraged when the state takes another human life, and should therefore make a real effort to understand and consider the effects of a state system of execution.

Justice for victims -- whose human rights have been so completely violated -- does not come from violating the human rights of others. Justice, instead, must come in another way, and that way must include a recognition of the worth and dignity of all and a willingness to work toward a world that upholds, rather than denies, the value of human life.

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