Caning

 Corporal punishment in school:  I find it regrettable that concern for very deserving human rights has now gone so far as to make it dangerous for the principals of our High Schools in the West Indies to order canings of delinquent students.  A caning from time to time of the worst offenders in school has always had a very salutary effect on maintaining discipline.  A couple of raps across the knuckles, or a belting across the bottom is just as salutary.  I do not know about you, but I never suffered any harm to my body or soul from all the canings I got as a school child.  So far as I can remember, I got six strokes from the pesi cane on my backside most Monday mornings for five years for refusing to play boring sports on weekends.  The caning is meant less to modify behaviour than to teach a lesson.  The caning did not make me want to play sports.  It was not intended to convert me to be a sports lover.  What I learned from my regular weekly canings was that there are consequences for breaking the rules.  The caning merely said that if you disobey a direct order from the Sports Master, there are going to be painful consequences.  If a child puts his hand in the fire on the stove he gets burned and never does it again.  A valuable lesson for life is learned.  Caning is a cheap, effective and instantaneous form of teaching.  Today it is banned, and there is no effective suitable alternative available in school. 

Nowadays, school children are taught, by the absence of pain and suffering for wrongdoing, that there are no consequences for breaking the rules.  The result is chaos in schools and in society.  We have to have police security at all our school gates to confiscate the knives and guns, and we have to send students to the hospital suffering from wounds and injuries.  The child psychologists who have corrupted our education system in this way have a great deal to answer for.  It is due to their teaching that so many of our students can hardly read and write and have no self-discipline. 

I do not consider a caning in school of a delinquent schoolboy to be in breach of the child's human rights.  Nor do I believe such a caning to be inhuman treatment.  There are many worse things that happen to school children that they survive and move on from.  This includes sexual abuse and drunken maltreatment by their fathers, uncles and brothers.  Such home conditions affect a significant percentage of our school children, yet no one does anything about it.  The perpetrators continue to attend church every Sunday and are accepted as prominent and distinguished members of our society.

I include, as an equally unacceptable form of child abuse, the fact that most of our Primary School children in Anguilla arrive in the High School unable to read or write. 

This aversion to a healthy, harmless and effective form of corporal punishment is the most degenerate of the modern norms of European culture that we are being told we must emulate, or be in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Torture

Freedom from inhuman treatment:  We are looking at our fundamental rights under the 1982 Anguilla Constitution.  The fifth of these rights is the right to be protected from inhuman treatment.

You may well think that this is a pretty obvious human right.  No one in the West Indies today can be put to the rack for their religion or to collect a confession.  It is generally accepted today that torture is an unreliable means of obtaining useful information.  However, torture has throughout history been used as a means of terrorising populations or specific communities.  

 Franz Fanon, in “Les Damnees de la Terre”, reports that the French in Algeria used ‘preventative torture’ on entirely innocent people to stop them doing anything in the future.  Although claiming to use torture in order to save lives, the French colonial regime killed between 1-1.5 million Algerians in the process.   

The Red Cross has estimated that 80% of detainees held by US Army forces at Abu Ghraib in Iraq were the ‘wrong people’.  Yet, the US Army in recent years with approval from the highest levels has approved torture of these detainees in support of the ‘war on terror’.

Besides these obvious examples of illegal torture, there are some West Indian nuances that you may find interesting.  A few years ago, two murderers in Jamaica, Pratt and Morgan, took the government to court.  They had been convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.  They had appealed their sentence to the Jamaican Court of Appeal, and lost.  They appealed to the Privy Council and lost.  They now appealed to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.  Jamaica was a signatory to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights Agreement.  The prisoners had meanwhile spent nearly fourteen years on death row, waiting to be executed.  Of course, they had been filing appeal after appeal, which had resulted in the long delay in the carrying out of the sentence. 

They filed a case in the High Court claiming that the delay in government hanging them had subjected them to many years of dread and fear that amounted to cruel and inhuman punishment.  Note, they were not saying that the death penalty was cruel and inhuman punishment.  Their claim was that the long delay in carrying out the sentence, the long wait on death row, was what was cruel and inhuman. 

The High Court in Jamaica laughed at the convicts and threw out the case.  They appealed to the Court of Appeal, and lost.  The case reached right up to the Privy Council in London.  They succeeded in having the Privy Council hold that their sentence amounted to cruel and inhuman punishment.  The Privy Council ruled that if the government cannot for any reason execute a murderer within five years of his conviction, then the sentence must be commuted to life imprisonment.  This ruling applies to all Commonwealth countries in the West Indies and elsewhere.  To keep someone on death row for longer than that period of time, the court ruled, will constitute cruel and inhuman treatment.  That is now the law throughout the West Indies.  It is not very relevant to us in Anguilla, since the penalty of hanging for murder in Anguilla was long ago abolished.  The only penalty for murder now in Anguilla is life imprisonment. 

Still, you may agree that it is useful to have a Supreme Court looking out for instances of cruel and inhuman treatment.