Senior U.N. Official Assails Death-Penalty Secrecy As Obstruction of Human Rights

A senior United Nations human rights offi­cial has crit­i­cized the secre­cy with which coun­tries car­ry out the death penal­ty and called for greater trans­paren­cy by coun­tries that still employ cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. ​“There is far too much secre­cy,” United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights Andrew Gilmour (pic­tured) said in an inter­view released November 21 by the U.N. News Centre, ​“and it’s quite indica­tive the fact that although many coun­tries are giv­ing up the prac­tice, those that retain it nev­er­the­less feel that they have some­thing to hide.” 

170 nations have either abol­ished the death penal­ty — which U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has described as a ​“bar­bar­ic prac­tice” that ​“has no place in the 21^st cen­tu­ry”—or have not car­ried out an exe­cu­tion in more than a decade. Many of the gov­ern­ments that con­tin­ue to exe­cute pris­on­ers have shroud­ed their death-penal­ty prac­tices in secre­cy, hid­ing who is on death row and why, how exe­cu­tions are car­ried out, and — in some coun­tries — how the gov­ern­ment has dis­posed of the exe­cut­ed pris­on­er’s body. Guterres said the prac­tice man­i­fests ​“a lack of respect” for the human rights of those sen­tenced to death and ​“obstructs efforts to safe­guard the right to life.” 

In December 2016, the General Assembly added an anti-secre­cy pro­vi­sion to its reg­u­lar res­o­lu­tion call­ing for a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions, say­ing that trans­paren­cy was essen­tial to assess whether coun­tries were admin­is­ter­ing their death penal­ty laws in com­pli­ance with inter­na­tion­al human rights stan­dards. In September 2017, the death-penal­ty mora­to­ri­um res­o­lu­tion adopt­ed by the U.N. Committee on Human Rights again empha­sized the link between trans­paren­cy and respect for human rights. At an October 2017 event at U.N. Headquarters in New York com­mem­o­rat­ing World Day Against the Death Penalty, the Secretary-General said “[f]ull and accu­rate data is vital to pol­i­cy-mak­ers, civ­il soci­ety and the gen­er­al pub­lic. It is fun­da­men­tal to the debate around the death penal­ty and its impact.” Execution secre­cy, he said, ​“under­mines that debate.” 

Secrecy has been impli­cat­ed in recent exe­cu­tion botch­es and ques­tion­able exe­cu­tion prac­tices across the United States, In May 2016, an Oklahoma grand jury found that ​“para­noia” on the part of prison offi­cials about keep­ing exe­cu­tion infor­ma­tion secret had ​“caused admin­is­tra­tors to bla­tant­ly vio­late their own poli­cies,” con­tribut­ing to the botched exe­cu­tion of Clayton Lockett, the exe­cu­tion of Charles Warner with an unau­tho­rized exe­cu­tion drug, and the abort­ed attempt to exe­cute Richard Glossip. In Missouri, pros­e­cu­tors affir­ma­tive­ly used the state’s secre­cy pro­vi­sions to pre­vent pris­on­ers from obtain­ing evi­dence that the out-of-state com­pound­ing phar­ma­cy from which the state was ille­gal­ly obtain­ing drugs had com­mit­ted 1,892 vio­la­tions of phar­ma­cy health and safe­ty reg­u­la­tions.

Gilmour sin­gled out for crit­i­cism Arkansas’s rush to exe­cute eight pris­on­ers in an eleven-day span in April before its sup­ply of the drug mida­zo­lam expired. ​“I’ve heard var­i­ous argu­ments, absurd argu­ments for exe­cut­ing and some rather obscene argu­ments for exe­cut­ing,” Gilmour said, ​“but I don’t real­ly think I’ve heard many more obscene ones or absurd ones than the fact that the drugs for exe­cut­ing had reached their sell-by date.” 

As part of an inter­na­tion­al human rights efforts to end the secret trade in lethal-injec­tion drugs, the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has sup­port­ed a mul­ti-nation­al ini­tia­tive called the Alliance for Torture-Free Trade. ​“I think it’d be a step for­ward in civ­i­liza­tion to block this trade, and luck­i­ly there are some major drug com­pa­nies who are refus­ing to allow their drugs to be used in instances of exe­cu­tion,” Gilmour said.