The New Nation - Internet Edition

AFP, New Delhi

Rights group Amnesty International appealed on Friday to India to declare a "moratorium" on executions as an interim step towards abolishing the death penalty.

The London-based rights groups said there was a worldwide trend towards abolition and urged "India to declare an immediate moratorium on executions with a view to abolishing the death penalty."

As an emerging power, "India has an opportunity to exercise regional leadership and to send a strong signal of its determination to fully uphold human rights" by rejecting the death sentence. The appeal comes as President Pratibha Patel has 60 mercy petitions under review for people on death row including the high-profile case of a Muslim man, Afzal Guru, sentenced to hang for plotting a 2001 attack on India's parliament.

The petition is Guru's last hope after the Supreme Court in 2006 upheld his death sentence for conspiracy in the attack that nearly brought nuclear-armed India and Pakistan to war in 2002. He has claimed innocence in the attack, blamed on Islamic militants fighting New Delhi's rule in Kashmir, that left 14 dead, including the five attackers. Many opponents of his execution say he did not get a fair trial.

The rights watchdog which has condemned Guru's sentence said it feared India's leaders lacked the political courage and human rights leadership to abolish the death penalty with the public "erroneously" believing it deters violent crime.

The Amnesty report called "The Death penalty in India: A Lethal Lottery" highlighted "the essential unfairness" of the use of the death penalty in India.

After studying 56 years of evidence used to hand down death sentences, Amnesty said it had found "abuse of law and procedure and arbitrariness and inconsistencies in the investigation process."

The last execution in India was in 2004 when a 41-year-old former security guard, Dhananjoy Chatterjee, was hanged for the rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl in the eastern city of Kolkata-the first execution since 1995.

India's Supreme Court ruled in 1980 the death penalty was to be imposed only in the "rarest of rare" cases. But Amnesty said some people were handed death sentences for crimes for which others received lesser punishment.