Episcopal Press and News

Sri Lanka's Churches Join Campaign Against Death Penalty

Episcopal News Service. April 16, 2003 [2003-085-3]

Churches in Sri Lanka have added their voices to a movement opposing calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty in the island nation where the last state execution took place in 1976.

'The death penalty is state homicide. We cannot support it under any circumstances,' said Anglican Bishop Duleep de Chickera of Colombo, speaking as Sri Lanka's parliament prepares to debate after Easter the reintroduction of capital punishment.

Although the death penalty has not been abolished in the South Asian nation, Amnesty International, the human rights organization, says that Sri Lanka has an established practice of not carrying out executions. In recent years, however, there have been calls for the application of the death penalty to deal with murder and drug trafficking.

Leaders of both the Roman Catholic Church and Sri Lanka's National Council of Churches (NCC), which groups eight mainstream Protestant churches, have made appeals to the government not to heed the calls.

'This is a serious concern. We cannot keep quiet when efforts are on to restore it,' the NCC's chairperson, Anglican bishop Kumara Illangasinghe, told ENI by telephone from his diocesan office at Kurunegale in central Sri Lanka. Illangasinghe said a strong lobby including government ministers and fundamentalist organizations was demanding the revival of capital punishment. Leaders of both the NCC and the Catholic Bishops Conference of Sri Lanka met in Kandy on April 3 to discuss the issue.

Following the meeting, Roman Catholic Archbishop Oswald Gomis of Colombo issued a strong statement reiterating Christian opposition to the death penalty. 'This [the death penalty] is not a solution to reduce crime rate,' said Gomis. Crime needed to be tackled, the archbishop said, 'not with just punitive measures that embitter offenders but [with] corrective action to renew ruptured relations and restore human dignity.'