Nicholas Salmons
10/30/09
1:19 pm
It has been confirmed by the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD) that 4 Tibetans were executed on October 20, 2009 for "alleged involvement in last year's mass protest in the Tibetan capital." No information regarding the executions has been reported in the Chinese state media. According to the article, only one man's body has been accounted for, as apparently it was returned to his family and then "immersed in Kyichu River." The TCHRD opposes the death penalty in all cases as it violates the "fundamental right to life and the right not to be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment." The TCHRD also notes that the death penalty holds no special deterrent effect, and can by no means justify the wrongs committed by the accused, particularly when the justification offered by the state for the executions is that the men "have to be executed to assuage the people's anger."
I think this article made a good point that the death penalty inherently violates the notion that all people are granted the right to life. For some reason it made me think of abortion and all the conflicts therein. Then it made me think of how gorillas, when changing hands in alpha male status, kill off the old male's offspring. All of this stems from and leads me to the question "where then do human rights come from, and what then are they?" Somewhat unrelated, but when we talked in class about growing up in a combat zone, and how that would frame a child's mind to think wide-scale, real and daily violence was nothing less than commonplace; it made me wonder if because I have grown up in a country that uses wide-scale, virtual (and also real) and daily violence primarily to entertain itself, I might have the disfigured notion that violence isn't the norm.
http://www.tchrd.org/press/2009/pr20091022.html
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