The Death Penalty in Its Many Forms

The deed has been done. The death dealing chemical was injected and three human beings had there lives ended. Last Wednesday, 30 March, three Filipinos were put to death in China by lethal injection. Amnesty International says that there can be thousands executed in China, the real figure is unknown due to strict secrecy. Iran and Saudi Arabia also execute minors. Eighteen countries executed people in 2009. Despite a United Nations call for a moratorium on the death penalty. The methods of execution can be beheading, stoning, hanging, electrocution, shooting and lethal injection. Twenty thousand more are on death row around the world.

The Filipinos executed in China were found guilty of separate crimes for trafficking heroine into China. They were drug couriers hired by syndicates and sent to their death. The Philippine government asked for a stay of execution over a month ago, it was granted but only for a short period. The Philippine government has little leverage with China, the Asian giant. It is scorned in China, and seen as corrupt, disorganized and incompetent, especially after eight innocent Chinese tourists were killed in a botched rescue attempt when they were held hostage on a bus in Manila by a fired policeman seeking reinstatement.

China's anti-drug law is one of the strictest in the world shaped by the history of the Opium wars when the Western nations grew opium in India, addicted the Chinese and then sold the opium in return for silver, tea and silk. When the Emperor outlawed it the Western gunboats threatened to shell Peking. Drugs weakened China and brought great humiliation to a proud nation. China learned a vital lesson.

The death penalty is a barbaric cruel punishment according its opponents and the fact that it has been abolished by 137 nations, tends to uphold this opinion. Amnesty International says that China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States are responsible for most of the executions every year. Executions have fallen around the world from a high of about 714 in 2009 and in 2010 down to 527. That is little consolation to families of the executed Filipinos and a life-loving nation that has shared their grief.

The Philippines is a nation predominately Catholic and steeped in the Spanish catholic tradition. Faith can be sentimental, shallow, hypocritical, but also profound true deeply religious. That death penalty and execution most widely remembered is the one Christians look on daily in public and schools and churches -that of Jesus of Nazareth condemned to death by crucifixion. A most cruel and agonizing slow death. Few think of it that way. In fact for many the meaning has escaped them and they look on the image of the dying figure much of the time as a symbolic figure. Others have turned the crucifix into a fashion accessory or a diamond studded piece of jewelry, totally missing the contradiction that it is a instrument of torture and cruel death of a innocent man, the Son of God, for taking a stand with the poor and the oppressed. He died for his people, the people crying out for salvation from poverty hunger and injustice.

We tend to forget that the object of worship is a man wrongly and unjustly condemned and sentenced to suffer the death penalty as a convicted criminal for his activism and religious belief. In solidarity with the poor, he declared that they had the right to inherit the land, have justice and enter the kingdom of God first. For this they executed him.

In the past decades, thousands of Filipino human rights advocates and journalists, were shot, stabbed or chopped to death by hired mercenaries, or former military turned assassins and killers. The advocates were and are marked as subversives, trouble makers challenging the existing system, questioning the powers that rule and for that they were and are killed.

There are thousands more dying for a different kind of death penalty, that imposed by corrupt officials and an uncaring ruling elite in many countries. The Middle Eastern people have had enough and they are in full rebellion. Hunger and malnutrition is a form of death penalty for being poor which we must oppose. In taking a stand for life and the dignity of the human person we are working to abolish the death penalty in its many evil manifestations.