THE European Union (EU) has reaffirmed its stance that aid provided to Jamaica and other developing countries will not be withdrawn if executions are carried out on convicted criminals.

Helen Jenkinson, head of section in the EU Delegation, told the Observer that despite the popular sentiment among the majority of Jamaicans that administering the death penalty will impact the high rate of violent crime, the EU was staunchly against it.

Today is World and European Day Against the Death Penalty.

Jenkinson said the EU’s development programme for countries like Jamaica is not directly linked to any position on the death penalty.

“The EU takes the positive approach of supporting the work of the government and civil society in the fields of security and justice, as well as working on improving conditions in volatile communities,” she said.

“The EU considers the death penalty to be a cruel and inhumane punishment which violates human dignity and human rights. The death penalty has not been found to be a deterrent to crime and, since no legal system can be guaranteed to be wholly free from error, any miscarriage of justice involving the death penalty is irreversible,” Jenkinson said. “For these reasons, the European Union is totally opposed to the death penalty and supports its abolition and the UN moratorium with third world countries.”

In 2008, the upper and lower houses of Parliament voted to retain the death penalty on the Jamaican law books but no executions have been carried out here since 1988 despite the fact that the gallows at the St Catherine Adult Correctional Centre is kept in working order by penal officials

There are more than a dozen persons on death row in Jamaica. The last person to be sentenced to death was Leslie Moodie, the former Jamaica Defence Force (JDF) soldier convicted last month of murdering four patrons at a Kingston nightclub,

Also on death row is 23-year-old Andre Reid, who was found guilty of plotting the murders of two of three women in Greenwich Town, St Andrew in 2005.

The three women were gang-raped before they were shot and their bodies dumped in a sewage pit behind the Tinson Pen Aerodrome on Marcus Garvey Drive. However, one of the women survived the ordeal, managed to escape and later gave evidence against Reid and three of his cronies who were all sentenced to 35 years.

Lennox Swaby and Calvin Powell — the two men convicted for the 2006 murder of Mandeville couple Richard and Julia Lyn — are also death row prisoners.

An average of 5,500 executions are carried worldwide each year.

Between 1993 and 2009, the number of countries that abolished the death penalty by law for all crimes, grew from 55 to 97.

More than 66 per cent of the countries of the world are abolitionist in law or practice.

Jamaica is one of 58 countries that have retained the death penalty on their law books.

Eighteen countries carried out executions in 2009.

The most executions are carried out in China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United States.