Finality

It has been reported this week that a man from Britain has been convicted of supplying cannabis in the United Arab Emirates; he is now facing the death penalty. Regardless of whether this man is innocent or guilty, and regardless of the issue that perhaps people shouldn’t really be travelling to countries with backward legal systems, I fundamentally oppose the death penalty. As a civilised human being I do not believe it is my place, or anyone else’s, to take another human life against their will. Even for those criminals who have taken a life themselves by committing murder, I feel it is important for a decent society to rise above those criminals by not performing similar acts. If an enraged relative or close friend of a victim took lethal action against the perpetrator of a heinous crime, I would have a significant degree of empathy, but for a country or state to sanction killing outside the confines of warfare / self-defence is, in my opinion, taking things to a lower level of morality that we should all be trying to avoid. I am proud to say that in the United Kingdom nobody has been executed since 1964.

UN Unfit For Purpose

After the end of the Second World War, the United Nations was set up in the hope that it could prevent further terrible conflict. A Security Council was appointed to specifically oversee areas where potential warfare could break out. The five permanent members of that council - the five main victors in World War II - were the United Kingdom, the United States of America, France, Russia and China; each of the permanent members was granted the power of veto, so that any military intervention would require the consent of all five countries. These were noble aspirations of introducing democracy into scenarios of violence during a period of difficult political and social reconstruction. Unfortunately, the long passage of time appears to have rendered these constructs unworkable. Syria is a country in chaos. The UN estimates that around 9,000 people have died since pro-democracy protests began in March 2011. Regardless of a recent UN-brokered ceasefire, lethal aggression is continuing; this week an explosion in Hama took more innocent lives. France is now saying that the Security Council should consider the use of force in Syria as the peace plan is failing. Britain and the USA (although preferring to be non-interventionist) would almost certainly be willing to go along with using force as a last resort which we now must have reached. Yet the force option will probably not go ahead due to the veto of the other permanent members. Russia and China have their own agendas: they are anti-American (just watch the Russia Today news channel and see that every other story is slating the US!); they are worried about sacrificing their own economic deals (i.e. oil) that they have previously brokered with the brutal dictator Bashar al-Assad, as then they would have to share the spoils with other world powers; and they are concerned about losing dominant influence in a prime political area. Basically, Russia and China are gladly putting their own nationalistic egos first, and genocide a distant second. Shame on them, eternal shame.