Dinan, Brittany

The New Abolitionism

While Kopp's lawyer, the French courts and the Justice Department were concluding their negotiations for his extradition from Brittany, the speed and intensity with which the American death penalty debate has moved to a world stage were cast in bold relief across France in Strasbourg. If Dinan is defined by its ancient walls, Strasbourg, a few miles from the German border, is defined by the massive Modernist palaces of the European Union: the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and the European Court of Human Rights, adjoining one another in an expansive park near the city center. There in late June, two days after the United States executed Juan Raul Garza in Terre Haute, Indiana, the Council of Europe and the French capital-punishment abolition group Ensemble Contre la Peine de la Mort convened a World Congress on the Death Penalty, packing the parliamentary chambers and the streets of Strasbourg for three days with lawyers, politicians and activists from several continents.

On the one hand, it was the kind of politico-cultural happening that seems quintessentially European: In front of the elegantly stylized tree trunk from which springs the dais of the Council of Europe, veteran human rights lawyers and youthful Mumia Abu-Jamal advocates rubbed shoulders with Jacques Derrida, Angela Davis and Bianca Jagger.

Yet at the same time, it was clear that in Europe, at least, capital punishment is a hot topic in the highest councils of power. Austrian parliamentarian Walter Schwimmer, the avuncular Secretary General of the Council of Europe, declared the American death penalty "our greatest concern," calling a lengthy press conference with Jagger and exonerated American death-row inmate Kerry Cook to underscore the point. Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and chairman of Northern Ireland's police-reform commission, called on the United States to "observe the strict limits set in international agreements" on the execution of retarded and juvenile offenders. French elder statesman and legal scholar Robert Badinter, who as François Mitterrand's Justice Minister abolished the guillotine twenty years ago and who rushed from the Congress to negotiate the truce in Macedonia, pointed out that just four countries--China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United States--are responsible for 90 percent of world executions. "How can you explain these strange bedfellows?" he demanded.

Europeans oppose the death penalty in general, and in America in particular, for a variety of reasons. In Italy--home to some of the Continent's most dedicated anti-capital-punishment campaigns, such as the transnational group Hands Off Cain--the Vatican has played a central role, following Pope John Paul II's 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. In France, groups like the League of Human Rights, founded in 1898 to defend Alfred Dreyfus, have given capital punishment abroad greater prominence, as the worst European colonial and authoritarian abuses of past generations have grown more remote. Reflexive anti-Americanism may play a part too. But increasingly--evident in any casual conversation about Timothy McVeigh--it is simple horrified bafflement.

This is not just a matter of cultural opposition. As that string of recent court cases suggests, anti-death-penalty countries--and not only in Europe--are seeking ways to intervene actively in American law and politics in a systematic and canny fashion. Three years ago the European Union declared capital punishment worldwide its top human rights priority and began channeling money into conferences, reports and lobbying. Some of the money is going toward legal reform in China, which has far and away the largest number of executions, an estimated 1,000 per year. But the greatest political effort is going toward the United States, because it is here, EU ministers feel, that they can have the greatest influence.

One crucial center of activity is the Council of Europe, comprising parliamentarians from member nations. In early June the council's Human Rights Committee threatened to revoke US observer status--along with that of Japan, the only other observer state to retain capital punishment--unless a national death penalty moratorium is imposed within two years. "A Council of Europe observer state has to accept the principles of human rights and democracy to which all members commit themselves," says Renate Wohlwend, a parliamentarian from Liechtenstein and the council's rapporteur on the death penalty. "The United States is no exception." Not long ago it might have been laughable to think of Liechtenstein attempting to influence the United States in any way; but the Council of Europe and the EU have effectively amplified and given institutional clout to voices like Wohlwend's.

Activists are looking for creative ways to intensify European pressure. At the World Death Penalty Congress in Strasbourg, Steven Hawkins, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty in Washington, found a receptive audience when he proposed that European nations target investment in the United States to non-death-penalty states--shifting hundreds of millions of dollars from Texas, California and Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, Michigan and moratorium-bound Illinois. Publicly, few officials are willing to go that far yet: "I view myself as a friend of America," said Secretary General Schwimmer. "I do not know that we will see economic boycotts. But at the same time, we will find ways to show the seriousness of our concern." Privately, European parliamentarians say Bush's persistent rebuffs of Europe over missile testing and the Kyoto treaty make the idea of eventual economic action far more palatable.

The intensity of European engagement echoes sentiments heard increasingly in the Americas. Canada removed the last vestiges of capital punishment from its laws in 1998, while Mexico--which in theory keeps a death penalty for treason and a handful of other extraordinary offenses--has not executed anyone in more than sixty years. Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda calls the forty-five Mexican nationals currently on US death rows "an important strain on bilateral relations"--so important a strain that Mexico has put a US defense attorney on full-time retainer for capital cases. Elsewhere in Latin America, only Guatemala and Guyana still have capital punishment on the books. In countries whose closets are still crammed with the skeletons of dictatorship and civil war, the death penalty has special meaning. Chile, for instance, formally abolished it in June (an event greeted in Rome with a celebratory lighting of the Colosseum). "Our countries have lived the death culture, so we know how important this is," said Andrés Zaldívar Larraín, president of Chile's Congress, in Strasbourg. In an exquisite irony, Fidel Castro--along with a few tiny Caribbean commonwealth states--joins the United States in keeping capital punishment alive in the Western Hemisphere.

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