Twenty years ago, at the end of 1988, 52 countries had abolished the death penalty — 35 of them for all crimes in all circumstances, and the rest of them for murder and other “ordinary” crimes, but not for treason or crimes in time of war. Today, 103 countries have abolished the death penalty, 95 of which have abolished it in all circumstances. Very few countries carry out executions: Only 48 have done so in the last 10 years, and the number has decreased during that time.
Last year, only 25 countries executed people, compared with 41 in 1995. In addition to those that have abolished the death penalty in law, 45 countries have kept it on their statute book but have not executed anyone for more than 10 years. Amnesty International regards 36 of them as truly “abolitionist in practice,” having a settled policy not to resume executions. If this group is added to those who have abolished capital punishment in law, 71 percent of countries have dispensed with executions as an arm of law enforcement.
Furthermore, with very few exceptions, once capital punishment has been abolished it has not been reintroduced. Only four countries, plus two states of the US, have done so since 1961, and only one of these resumed executions: the Philippines, which reinstated capital punishment for many offenses in 1994, and carried out seven executions between 1999 and 2000 before again abolishing the death penalty in June 2006 by overwhelming majorities of both the Senate and House of Representatives.
Why have the majority of countries abandoned the use of the death penalty in recent years? The foremost factor has been the political movement to view capital punishment not as an issue to be decided solely or mainly as an aspect of national criminal justice policy, but rather as a fundamental violation of human rights — the right to life and to be free of excessive, repressive and tortuous punishments, and the risk that an innocent or undeserving person may be executed.
This movement gained force as more and more countries emerged from totalitarian and colonial repression to embrace values that seek, in the name of democracy and freedom, to protect citizens from the power of the state and the tyranny of public opinion.
This new dynamic embraces the view that capital punishment should be regarded neither as a weapon of national criminal justice policy to be enforced according to a government’s assessment of its value as a crime control measure, nor as an issue to be judged in terms of local cultural or socio-political values.
The human rights approach to abolition rejects the most persistent of justifications for capital punishment: retribution and the need to denounce and expiate crimes that shock our sensibilities by their brutality.
It also rejects the utilitarian justification that nothing less severe can act as a sufficient deterrent to those who contemplate committing capital crimes. This is not only because the social science evidence does not support the claim that capital punishment is necessary to deter murder, but because even if it did have a marginal deterrent effect, it could only be achieved by high rates of execution, mandatorily and speedily enforced.
This, abolitionists assert, would increase the probability of innocent or wrongfully convicted persons being executed and lead to the execution of people who, because of the mitigating circumstances in which their crimes were committed, do not deserve to die.
RSS