Justice Minister Suspends Hangings in South Africa

Justice Minister Hendrick J. Coetsee, stepping in to defuse a dispute that had threatened to derail talks on political reform, suspended hangings indefinitely Friday.

Coetsee said hangings will not resume until parties negotiating South Africa’s transition to non-racial democracy have agreed upon an interim bill of human rights.

President Frederik W. de Klerk suspended hangings in 1990 until judicial reforms could be implemented. No one has been executed under more liberal rules that came into force last year.

Lawyers for Human Rights, which has long campaigned for an end to the death penalty, welcomed Coetsee’s statement.

“It’s great,” a spokesman said. “We welcome the fact that the minister recognizes the issue as one for negotiation.”

The government drew fire this week when it announced that 17 blacks and whites on Death Row had exhausted all appeals and could he hanged “in the normal course of events.”

African National Congress Secretary General Cyril Ramaphosa said that executions now, when a non-racial constitution is still being negotiated, could torpedo the talks.

Coetsee said in a statement that courts would still impose death sentences where appropriate and that De Klerk would continue to consider appeals for clemency.

“The government has deemed it fair, pending the outcome of discussions on an interim bill of fundamental rights . . . , to suspend the execution of death sentences which have not been commuted for a reasonable period of time,” he said.

Justice Ministry spokesman Werner Krull said 17 people were awaiting the one-week notice of execution that precedes a hanging at Pretoria Central Prison.

He said 257 more people, most of them black, were awaiting final word on their appeals.

South Africa was second only to Iran in the use of the death penalty until De Klerk called for reform of the law that made execution mandatory for several classes of crime.

South Africa executed an average of about 100 people a year in the 1980s, peaking at 187 in 1987, when 21 people were hanged in a single week.