Issues involving the use of the death penalty in Barbados will be discussed here when Baroness Patricia Scotland and Madame Ruth Dreifuss arrive in Barbados on Monday, according to a statement issued by The British High Commission.
Baroness Scotland, who was born in Dominica, was formerly Attorney General of England and Wales in the Labour administration and is a member of the UK’s All Party Parliamentary Group on the Abolition of the Death Penalty, while Madame Dreifuss is a Commissioner with the International Commission against the Death Penalty and a former President of Switzerland.
During the visit, they will meet with government ministers as well as senior legal officials and according to the statement the two officials are visiting Barbados “to discuss issues around the death penalty in Barbados”.
Last year, Barbados said it would move to abolish the automatic death penalty in keeping with an Inter-American human rights court decision.
Attorney General Adriel Brathwaite said in a newspaper interview however that the death penalty would remain on the statute books, though he acknowledged that there was less of a chance that convicted murderers would be hanged. The death penalty has not been carried out here in nearly 27 years.
“Under the Offence against the Person Act, the judge has no choice but to impose a death sentence on a person convicted of murder.
But the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in the case of two convicted killers Lennox Boyce and Tyrone DaCosta Cadogan who appealed before the hemispheric tribunal that an automatic death sentence violated their human rights.
