Shaheed Bhagat Singh's kin leads campaign against death penalty
WSN Network

BRUSSELS: Professor Jagmohan Singh, a nephew of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, has joined a worldwide campaign, especially in Europe, by his Sikh community against death penalty.

"A civil society should not descend to the status of murderers by preferring revenge over far better forms of justice. All investigations, however meticulous, are subject to human error. Such errors become irreversible in a case where the death penalty is imposed. All over the world, there have been cases of executed people being proved innocent after their death," Prof Jagmohan Singh said in Brussels.

Since early 2006, Sikhs in France have joined the campaign, organising protests and lodging petitions with the Indian embassy in Paris expressing their opposition to the death penalty. They are also calling for release of all Sikhs they claim have been jailed "unjustly" for political reasons in India. In August 2007, a Europe-wide protest by Sikhs calling for an end to the death penalty in India commenced in Brussels outside the European Commission headquarters and the European Parliament building.

The Sikhs then urged European Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering and the EC Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner to link future trade with India with abolition of the death penalty and respect for the rights of minorities, such as the Sikhs.

The EU is India's largest trading partner, responsible for about 25 percent of its exports.

Some 700 people are on the death row in India. The current campaigning in Europe is highlighting the case of Professor Davinderpal Singh Bhullar where Germany, a prominent EU member, is directly involved. The Bhullar affair is one of the most controversial and high profile death penalty cases in recent Indian history. Almost 12 years ago, Bhullar, a Sikh political activist, was deported from Germany to India on the basis that he had nothing to fear on his return.

But Bhullar was arrested immediately he landed in Delhi. In prison he was tortured to obtain a false confession, and in 2001 he was sentenced to death by hanging for a crime he allegedly did not commit. Sikhs say Germany's deportation of Bhullar to a country still retaining the death penalty was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Indian courts continue to dish out death sentences. Bhai Jagtar Singh Hawara and Bhai Balwant Singh, who avenged the killings in fake encounters by getting rid of gross human rights violator Chief Minister of Punjab Beant Singh have been ordered to be hanged. The European Commission, European Parliament and Council of the European Union are now being urged to press for the death sentences to be lifted.

To underline that the current anti-death penalty campaign is not only about Sikhs on the death row, Singh also calls for the sparing of another high-profile death row inmate in India, the alleged terrorist Mohammed Afzal, also known as Afzal Guru, a Muslim from India's trouble-torn state of Jammu and Kashmir.

Afzal was convicted of conspiracy in the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. In 2004, he was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of India, but his sentence was stayed after his family filed a mercy petition to the President of India. Top leagal experts and civil society leaders have blown many holes into the police theory and investigation.

31 October, 2007