PENALTY

I was appalled that my closest friends and colleagues in human rights
organizations did nothing either.
I am very proud of the constitution ratified by the Constituent Assembly
on 27 January 2014, which guarantees many rights and freedoms.
But I would have been even more proud had Tunisia become the first
Arab country to join the circle of democratic countries and civilized
nations that have abolished this barbaric punishment.
“I WAS DIGGING MY OWN POLITICAL GRAVE
BY SYSTEMATICALLY PARDONING PEOPLE WHO
WERE SENTENCED TO DEATH.”
—Mohamed Moncef Marzouki
We need to make sense of this failure in a country that was offered an
historic opportunity, having known a democratic revolution, a strong
human rights movement, and a fervent opponent of capital punishment
as head of state.
There are two causes for this failure, one contextual and one structural.
Contextually, the drafting of the constitution, which started after the
October 2011 elections and lasted until January 2013, was marred
with terrorist attacks that resulted in many losses in the ranks of the
army and the police. At these martyrs’ funerals and subsequent meetings
with their families at the Carthage Palace, all I could hear were
the cries of these families for retaliation against those who killed their
sons, sometimes expressed with extremely violent imagery. In such
circumstances it is very difficult to advocate for abolition.
nowhere, because it gives us only two choices: Advocate for abolition
outside the Islamic framework, or accept the death penalty and give up
our hope of seeing Tunisia in the circle of civilized countries.
But because I am a faithful Muslim and cannot extract myself from
the value system within which I grew up, I found an answer in the
following verse: “Whoever kills a soul unless for a soul or for corruption
in the land, it is as if he had killed all mankind, and whoever saves
it, it is as if he saved all mankind.” In my opinion, this verse warns
against killing an innocent person mistakenly or unfairly—which is
common under capital punishment—because the act of killing all
mankind, even symbolically, is an extraordinary responsibility no one
is able to bear.
This is why I argue that we have to give up a right which the Koran
considers lawful but which, when interpreted and applied by humans,
has led to killing all mankind on countless occasions. The Koran does
not accept this.
The intellectual debate on this issue will certainly continue for years,
and it will be difficult to convince society even after terrorism has
been defeated. But our mission as human rights defenders is to continue
advocating, because the matter is not just about people whom
we need to save from a barbaric and ineffective punishment, but also
about helping society advance towards a higher degree of civilization.
The structural cause was even more difficult to overcome: the dominant
religious culture that considers capital punishment part of
Islamic sharia law, and therefore not open to debate. For many years
in the human rights struggle, I consistently made reference to verses
of the Koran that encourage pardon, forgiveness and mercy, all of
which are core values of our noble Islamic religion.
But every reference I made was countered by a reference to other parts
of the Koran that explicitly call for retaliation. Such a position leads
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