The English-speaking Caribbean nations of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) have in general supported the same principles for a strong International Criminal Court (ICC) as European and Latin American nations, but the question of the death penalty has been an exception.

"Trinidad and Tobago has the death penalty for murder. If a murderer can get the death penalty, it's very difficult to reconcile it with someone who committed genocide getting life in prison," argued a legal expert for one Caribbean nation, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "I really think this is a general Caribbean, Caricom view."

Support for the death penalty, however, puts Trinidad and other Caricom states in a complex position with their allies among the "like-minded" states which share the Caribbean bloc's view on a strong ICC prosecutor and limited Security Council involvement.

Although many of the major Caricom states - such as Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana and Barbados, the four most populous members - are supporters of the death penalty, much of the like-minded group, from Western Europe to South Africa to Latin America, has ended capital punishment. 

As a consequence, much of the group, and presumably a majority of nations overall, will not accept applying the death penalty to genocide and other core crimes, leaving life imprisonment as the maximum penalty which the Court could impose.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan conceded the difficulties in allowing capital punishment in the ICC, noting that "there are many governments in the UN who do not accept the death penalty" in their own national laws.

"Speaking personally, I do not see how the death penalty can be imposed by a Court that is now under discussion, given the differences among juridical systems among the member states," Annan argued. "In the two ad hoc tribunals that (the UN) has set uo, both Bosnia and Rwanda, death penalties are not part of the punishment."

The likelihood that the death penalty might not be on the agenda, however, poses a vexing political problem for the Caribbean nations that would otherwise eagerly support the ICC. The Caribbean expert contended that "as far as the ICC is concerned, there's no way that Trinidad and Tobago can endorse a position against the death penalty."

That in turn could place the government in Port-of-Spain in an awkward position if, as expected, the death penalty is not accepted for the ICC, where it would still be willing to sign on to the ICC statute, but would not want to imply by doing so that it might favour abolishing the death penalty, he added. The danger, he argued, was of any "misinterpretation" between support for the Court and opposition to the death penalty.

Capital punishment has proven to be politically popular in Trinidad and Tobago, where some 90 percent of the population supports the death penalty.  Such high political support has pushed Prime Minister Basdeo Panday's government to expedite procedures to execute five convicted murderers by this month's end. That has pitted the government against both the British-established privy court, which does not have a death penalty, and the Inter-American Court on Human Rights, which has called for a stay of the executions.

Both the Barbadian and Guyanese governments plan to follow Trinidad's lead in its withdrawal from the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights so that they, too, may speed up executions.