Let's Banish the Death Penalty

The celebration of the World Day Against the Death Penalty is an occasion to update the tally of legal systems where executions are still permitted or have just been prohibited, as well as to review the main issues of a long-standing debate.

Over the last decade, the number of countries that still resort to the death penalty has gone down, while the number of abolitionist countries has climbed to 103, thanks to Mongolia which reformed its penal code at the beginning of 2016 by removing the death sentence from its statutes. In parallel, in legal systems where it is still present, there is a trend toward limiting its applicability to the worst crimes. Even in the absence of a formal review of its legal status, several countries in fact limit the applicability of the death penaly.

Russia, which last joined the Council of Europe on the issue, does not execute people by virtue of a formal moratorium. In Europe, therefore, the actual application of this ancient form of punishment remains confined to Belarus.

All EU member states have in fact long abolished the death penalty, considering it incompatible with the protection of fundamental rights and, primarily, the right to life, considered inviolable. The argument underscoring the guarantee of human rights is also cemented by practical considerations, centered on the fact that the death penalty does not act as a deterrent, as first lucidly argued by Beccaria in his famous treatise On Crime and Punishment.

Despite these compelling arguments, moreover reinforced by the irreversible risk of sending to death a person that turns out to be innocent, there are large regions of the globe which continue to support the retention principle in relation to capital punishment. This is in reference not only to authoritarian regimes and precarious democracies, but also the United States and Japan, whose governments remain convinced that the death penalty is an equitable response to criminal felonies that have a strongly negative social value. Indeed, in these systems, there is still the idea about the preventive value of punishment (referring to the community), which is joined by individual preventive factor (referring to the convict), hard to contest, at least in practice and save mistrial, but is obviously irreconcilable with the rehabilitative purpose of sentences, which should be aimed at the social reinsertion of those convicted.

The presence of the death penalty is almost taken for granted in the Middle East and North Africa, where legal systems permeated by sharia commonly contemplate various degrees of corporal punishment up to capital punishment. Its use is also no wonder in authoritarian or not fully democratic regimes, where executions become tools for the repression of political dissent. Indeed, there are cases in which the political reasons are welded with sectarian motives.

However, by way of summary, it must be noted that the death penalty has been de jure or de facto abolished in more than two-thirds of the countries of the world. In retentionist jurisdictions, now comprising less than sixty states, the number of death sentences that result in actual executions remains low (with few exceptions; for example, it is estimated that China executed 1,200 people in the first half of 2016 year, a number in line with the 2,400 death sentences carried out in 2015).

Taking a broad perspective, one cannot but note that the abolitionist trend is prevalent with respect to the retentionist orientation. In a logic of gradual progress, the hope remains that of exposure of this residual minority of countries to democratic principles, bent on the protection and promotion of human rights, and thus incompatible, both logically and legally, with the use of capital punishment.