(AP) Jamaica is preparing to abolish a slavery-era law allowing flogging and whipping as means of punishing prisoners, the Caribbean country's justice ministry said Thursday.
The ministry said the punishment hasn't been ordered by a court since 2004 but the statutes remain in the island's penal code. It was administered with strokes from a tamarind-tree switch or a cat o'nine tails, a whip made of nine, knotted cords.
Justice Minister Mark Golding says the "degrading" punishment is an anachronism which violates Jamaica's international obligations and is preventing Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller's government from ratifying the U.N. convention against torture.
The Cabinet has already approved repealing the flogging law and amendments to other laws in the former British colony, where plantation slavery was particularly brutal.
The announcement was welcomed by human rights activists who view the flogging law as a barbaric throwback in a nation populated mostly by the descendants of slaves.
The last to suffer the punishment in Jamaica was Errol Pryce, who was sentenced to four years in prison and six lashes in 1994 for stabbing his mother-in-law.
Pryce was flogged the day before being released from prison in 1997 and later complained to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, which ruled in 2004 that the form of corporal punishment was cruel, inhuman and degrading and violated his rights. Jamaican courts then stopped ordering whipping or flogging.