THE latest in Sen. Ronaldo “Bato” Dela Rosa’s grand plan to pass a law that will hang people involved in bigtime illegal drug peddling: “Sige lang sila proof. Proof nang proof, wala nang mangyayari dito sa ating bansa kung sige lang tayo.” (Nothing will happen to our country if they keep on asking for proof.)
This was his reply to critics in his bid to revive capital punishment in the country. He’d rather that he rely on what he learned on ground rather than scientific research to back the law he is imagining.
But there is reason not to take Dela Rosa’s plan lightly. President Rodrigo Duterte has been pushing for the reinstatement of the death penalty. In 2017, in the 17th Congress, the House of Representatives passed the measure, although it faced strong opposition from the senators. Remember how it was pointless to academically argue in a setting were politics is the order of the day. This time, it could be worse, we have a super majority at the behest of the President.
Let us, however, note that the Philippines is a signatory to the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which bans state parties from reimposing death penalty.
Having ratified it, the Philippines falls under beneficiary country status for the European Union-Generalized System of Preferences Plus (EU-GSP+), which gives us preferential tariff schemes that allow us to export more than 6,000 products, including textile, fish, fruits, coconut oil, foot wear, to any EU member tariff-free.
If the Philippines drops out of its human rights obligation under this protocol, the country is estimated to lose around 200,000 jobs in agriculture and manufacturing, an opposition congressman argued in 2017 against then House Bill 4727, which intended to revive capital punishment.
This economic implication is only one among the multitude of reasons that any move to revive death penalty should be cut in the bud.
Advanced states have long closed the debate, painstaking academic researches have found that capital punishment has never been a deterrent to crime. There is no direct connection between crime statistics and hanging criminals. Sealed, and unless there is a twist in human culture, the hatchet man in the Senate is worth listening to. But there is none so far. It has always been poverty that wins as major factor in crime proliferation.