[Editorial] Head of U.N.’s homeland maintains death penalty

Ban Ki-moon has caused a major controversy, and so shortly after becoming United Nations Secretary-General. Asked about the execution of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, he said that Hussein was responsible for "heinous crimes" against the Iraqi people and that their deaths must not be forgotten. He then said, "the issue of capital punishment is for each and every member state to decide," making it sound as if he supports the death penalty.

Major world media and human rights groups are saying Ban’s comments go against the basic position of the U.N., which has long opposed capital punishment, and that they might be viewed as supporting Hussein’s execution, which was criticized for having had many procedural problems. For those who had placed a lot of expectations in the first Korean U.N. Secretary-General, it is most unfortunate to have to see him engulfed in controversy from the very start. He nevertheless still has to pass the "baptism by fire" the world puts new secretaries-general through, and so we hope to see Ban learn a lesson from what happened and be better at carrying out the duties entrusted to him.

Ban’s comments were problematic for several reasons. To begin with, he is obligated to promote peace and do so from a neutral position, but he failed to give ample consideration to the realities in Iraq, where there has been a civil war situation heightened by sectarian conflict in the wake of the execution. Even the United States is trying to distance itself from the execution right now, but some observers are saying Ban’s comments will make people worried about "pro-U.S. tendencies" Ban had already been suspected of in some quarters.

The more important issue with Ban is that what he said might look like he does not get the fact that the U.N. is the final and ultimate fortress of human rights. The U.N.’s official position is that even persons convicted of crimes against humanity, genocide, and war criminals are not to be executed. And of the U.N.’s 192 members states, only Korea, the U.S., and 68 others still have capital punishment.

All this makes you wonder if what he said was the result of the fact that he was a Korean diplomat, a country that still maintains the death penalty. Korea has resisted carrying out death sentences for the past nine years, and therefore is close to being classified as a country that has essentially done away with it, but it continues to have capital punishment on the law books. There is no reason to maintain capital punishment when there is no evidence there is a relationship between the death penalty and crime rates. It is time for Korea to get rid of it and thus be more becoming of the nation that produced the current head of the United Nations.

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