This is an excerpt from a recent address Pope Francis gave to the International Association of Criminal Law.
I GREET you all cordially and want to express my personal gratitude for your service to society and the valuable contribution you make to the development of a justice that respects the dignity and rights of the human person, without discriminations.
I would like to share some points with you on certain questions that, though being in part debatable – in part – touch directly on the dignity of the human person and therefore involve the Church in her mission of evangelisation, of human promotion, and of service to justice and peace.
First of all I would like to pose two premises of a sociological nature, which are concerned with incitation to vendetta and criminal populism.
(On the incitation to vendetta) reality shows that the existence of the legal and political instruments necessary to address and resolve conflicts, does not offer sufficient guarantees to avoid some individuals being accused for the problems of all.
Life in common, structured around an organised community, is in need of rules of coexistence the free violation of which requires an appropriate response.
However, we live in times in which, both from some sectors of politics as well as on the part of some means of communication, there is, sometimes, incitation to violence and to vendetta, public or private, not only against those who are responsible for having committed crimes, but also against those on whom suspicion falls, founded or unfounded, of having infringed the law.
(On criminal populism) over the last decades a conviction has spread that through public punishment the most disparate social problems can be resolved, as if for the most diverse illnesses the very same medicine is recommended.
It is not a question of trust in some social function attributed traditionally to public punishment, but rather the belief that through such punishment those benefits can be obtained that require the implementation of another type of social or economic policy and of social inclusion.
Not only are scapegoats sought to pay with their freedom and their life for all the social evils, as was typical in primitive societies, but beyond this sometimes there is the tendency to construct enemies deliberately: stereotype figures, who concentrate in themselves all the characteristics that the society perceives or interprets as menacing.
The mechanisms of formation of these images are the same ones that, at their time, made possible the spread of racist ideas.
In regard to the primacy of life and the dignity of the human person, (and) to the death penalty, it is impossible to think that today States do not have at their disposal means other than capital punishment to defend the life of other persons from unjust aggression.
St John Paul II condemned the death penalty (cf. Encyclical Letter Evangelium Vitae, 56), as does also the Catechism of the Catholic Church (N. 2267).
However, it can be verified that States take life not only with the death penalty and with wars, but also when public officials take refuge in the shadow of State powers to justify their crimes.
The so-called extra-judicial or extra-legal executions are deliberate homicides committed by some States and their agents, often making it appear as clashes with delinquents or presented as the undesired consequence of a reasonable, necessary and proportional use of force to have the law applied.
In this way, even if among the 60 countries that keep the death penalty, 35 have not applied it in the last [10] years, the death penalty is applied, illegally and in different degrees, across the whole planet.
The same extra-judicial executions are perpetrated in a systematic way not only by States of the international community, but also by entities not recognised as such, and they represent genuine crimes.
The arguments opposed to the death penalty are many and well known. The Church stressed some of them opportunely, such as the possibility of the existence of judicial error and the use that totalitarian and dictatorial regimes make of it, which use it as an instrument of suppression of political dissidence or of persecution of religious and cultural minorities, all victims that, for their respective legislations, are “delinquents”.
Therefore, all Christians and men of good will are called today to fight not only for the abolition of the death penalty, whether legal or illegal, and in all its forms, but also in order to improve the prison conditions, in respect of the human dignity of the persons deprived of freedom.
And I link this with a life sentence.
In the Vatican, since a short time ago, there is no longer a life sentence in the Penal Code.
A life sentence is a hidden death sentence.
Caution in the application of punishment must be the principle that governs penal systems, and the full validity and efficiency of the principle pro homine must guarantee that the States are not qualified, juridically or on the way, to subordinate respect of the dignity of the human person to any sort of social utility.
Respect of human dignity not only must operate as the limit to arbitrariness and to the excesses of State agents, but as the criterion of orientation for the pursuing and repression of behaviours that represent the gravest attacks to the dignity and integrity of the human person.
