At the outset of the new year, assessments of global security warn that conflict is spreading across more countries worldwide and a new scramble for nuclear weapons is underway. Yet a more encouraging trend is worth noting: In unlikely places, higher ideals of justice and equality are poking through.
On Tuesday, Zimbabwe joined the growing list of nations – now 149 – that have abolished the death penalty in law or practice. The reform marks a significant step in strengthening the rule of law. Since 1980, the southern African country has been governed by a single party with a long record of corruption and human rights abuses.
Courts will now review each case, revising sentences one by one based on a range of factors, including compassion and forgiveness. It is “more than a legal reform,” said Justice Minister Ziyambi Ziyambi. “It is a statement of our commitment to justice and humanity.” Similar measures have been adopted in recent years in Ghana, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka – to name a few.
In Syria and Bangladesh, two societies emerging from decades of violent dictatorship are starting to reshape themselves based on the tenets of what is often called transitional justice. After the fall of the Assad government in Syria last month, the country’s liberating forces immediately opened the regime’s network of prisons and began preserving documents showing the scope of its abuses.
The interim government in Bangladesh, meanwhile, established a commission to investigate disappearances and extrajudicial killings just two weeks after the country’s long-reigning autocratic leader, Sheikh Hasina, was deposed in a student-led uprising. In the panel’s first report last month, it documented more than 1,600 cases and identified eight secret detention centers in or near the capital.
“We are working anew to return our dear Bangladesh to the road of equality, human decency, and justice,” said Muhammad Yunus, head of the transitional government, in an interview with the website Big News Network on Dec. 29.
While no hard evidence exists that adopting more transparent and compassionate forms of justice diminishes the prospect of a country engaging in warfare, a correlation may yet exist. As the Death Penalty Information Center notes, capital punishment and extrajudicial killings disproportionately affect ethnic, religious, and racial minorities. Such inequality fuels grievances and radicalization. It encourages violence.
But the opposite is also true. The first step South Africa took after ending apartheid in 1994 was to abolish the death penalty. That decision set the country’s new democratic era on a foundation of equality and reconciliation. “Retribution cannot be accorded the same weight ... as the right to life and dignity,” declared then-Justice Arthur Chaskalson, who was also president of the Constitutional Court.
Zimbabwe, Syria, and Bangladesh may now be building on that example. When societies base justice on a recognition of the inherent value of every individual, their neighbors reap peaceful dividends.
