On April 24, 2014 Dr. Arif Bulkan took part in a United Nations Panel on the Death Penalty at the UN Headquarters in New York, USA. Entitled ‘Moving Away from the Death Penalty – Discrimination against Marginalised Groups’, the Panel was opened by the Secretary General Mr. Ban-Ki Moon and chaired by Mr. Ivan Šimonovi?, the Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights.

Background

Since 2012, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has held a series of events on the death penalty, focusing on national experiences in moving away from the death penalty, wrongful convictions, deterrence, public opinion, and the failure of judicial review to capture error in capital cases. These panel events drew on the experiences of senior officials and academic experts from various regions of the world which, in recent years, have made progress through either outright abolition or the imposition of a moratorium, de facto or de jure, or through narrowing the basis for imposition of the death penalty.

Dr. Bulkan’s presentation focused on links between vulnerable statuses (such as poverty, mental illness and gender) and the imposition of the death penalty. Other presenters were Dr. Usha Ramanathan, an internationally recognized expert on law and poverty from India, Ms. Alice Mogwe, an expert member of the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights Working Group on Death Penalty, and Professor Stephen Bright, President, Southern Center for Human Rights, Atlanta, Georgia, United States.