One further piece of unfinished business remains before I bring you some words and pictures from Cuba. My most recent column for The Connexion, a monthly newspaper for English speakers in France, dealt with capital punishment and the inevitable clamour for its return after the despicable events in Paris last month. Erik, our tour guide in Cuba, would quarrel with my conclusions ...
At 4.40am on September 10 1977, the blade of the guillotine descended in Marseille’s Baumettes prison and ended the wretched life of Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant who had tortured and murdered a young woman.
His was the last death from capital punishment before France abolished the ultimate penalty four years later.
But could it, in these turbulent times, return? After the appalling terrorist killings in Paris, the Front National leader Marine Le Pen demanded a referendum, reiterating her own belief that the sanction should be restored to the country’s “legal arsenal”.
Excluded, to use her term, from the Je suis Charlie rally of national unity in the capital, reduced to staging a little demonstration of her own in the southern FN stronghold of Beaucaire, Ms Le Pen perhaps felt obliged to produce a populist flourish.
Calling for murderers’ heads to roll, or for its equivalent in other countries, is guaranteed to inspire table-thumping public endorsement.
One poll of French opinion put support for Madame Guillotine’s up by several points at 50 per cent. That was last year. If half the French wanted capital punishment before the carnage at the Charlie Hebdo offices, Montrouge traffic accident scene and Hyper Cacher supermarket, you can safely assume the proportion has risen since.
In this case, French police units did the work of the public executioner, shooting dead the self-proclaimed murderers, Cherif and Said Kouachi and Amedy Coulibali. You do not need to be a bleeding heat liberal to see a yawning gulf between legitimate force, ending sieges that threaten further bloodshed, and the cold-blooded killing by authority of convicts.
The moral argument is that the taking of life is simply wrong, that the state must rise above recourse to the extreme violence of those it seeks to punish. If this fails to convince, plenty of practical reasons underpin the abolitionist case.
We have seen the desire for martyrdom of such ruthless fanatics as the brothers Kouachi and Coulibali. They expressed it in their final hours and Coulibali’s arrogant, taunting video reinforced the point, just as the British-born London suicide bombers had done in 2005.
If a terrorist cannot meet a defiant death in a shoot-out, the next best outcome – apart from escape - is to go to the scaffold after the spectacle of a high-profile trial. Previous French law previously stipulated death by firing squad for capital offences ”against the safety of the state”; it is not hard to envisage these three assassins, or Mohamed Merah before them after the 2012 Toulouse murders, imploring a court to apply such an interpretation to their odious crimes.
Much better to consign them to the oblivion of imprisonment for the rest of their worthless lives.
Robert Badinter, a former justice minister and president of France’s constitutional council, led the way in earlier debate. A tireless campaigner against capital punishment, he saw abolition in France as only a step towards ending judicial executions the world over.
Perhaps opponents of the death penalty should respect the equally strong views of those who believe it serves as a deterrent or at least asserts society’s right to self-defence. My late French father-in-law’s response to arguments about the history of miscarriages and wrongful executions was to insist that, in many cases, there was not the slightest possibility of doubt.
But for once I prefer to rest on the words of a highly fallible French public figure, the former president Jacques Chirac, who has had his own, somewhat less dramatic brushes with the law. “The conviction is taking hold,” he declared at the UN Human Rights Commission in 2001, “that death can never constitute an act of justice.”
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