“Capital Punishment, Human

Rights and the UN”1

Keynote presentation (followed by Q&A session) given on
February 23, 2007, by Prof. William Schabas (B.A., M.A, LL.M.,
LL.D.; Director, Centre for Human Rights, Galway, Ireland; etc.) at the
conference2 “Human Rights and Social Justice: Setting the Agenda
for the UN Human Rights Council”, February 23-25, 2007, which
formed part of the “Human Rights Action Week” at
The University of Winnipeg (Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada).

The names of those asking questions (Q&A session) are not included in this
summary, but can be discerned on the recording.

SUMMARY
(of audio recording3)

In Prof. Schabas’ words, abolition of the death penalty – unlike

improvements of other aspects of human rights, which are more difficult
to quantify – provides “a marvellous measure of the progress of human
rights”. In his speech on capital punishment, Prof. Schabas expresses a
firm belief that worldwide abolition will be seen within the next several
decades: “I say it’s as predictable as the fact that the glaciers in
Greenland will be gone by 2030, that the death penalty will be behind us
just as other terrible human rights violations…” If the current rate of
abolition and other relevant parameters are maintained constant, this
goal – involving abolition in the approximately 60 remaining countries –
should be reached in 2027, although Prof. Schabas indicates that the
calculation leading to this prediction is very crude.

While Prof. Schabas states that his optimism follows, in part, from
observing, in a purely statistical manner, the development (as laid forth in
reports like the 1989 Amnesty International report “When the State Kills”)
since 1948 – the year when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

1
Details on location etc. obtained from http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/index/hrsj-index
2
At http://www.archive.org/details/human_rights_and_social_justice copyright-free recordings
(and streaming audio) of the full set of conference sessions are available for download.
3
Visit http://www.archive.org/details/capital_punishment_human_rights_and_the_un to
download the copyright-free recording or to listen in streaming format.

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was adopted, which conventionally is taken as the starting point for the
international human rights movement – he also discusses, explicitly,
some of the several factors that are fuelling the process of continued
abolition, the present public opinion (as seen in polls and in the outrage
following the execution of Saddam Hussein), the “symbolic status” of the
removal of the death penalty during the birth of new democracies, the
irreversible nature of the abolition process (in the vast majority of cases),
and in general portrays capital punishment as something alien to a
civilized society.

Regarding the latter, he mentions that already during the drafting of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in the late 1940’s – a time when
capital punishment was practiced in most countries and the executions of
Nazis after the Nürnberg trials were still very recent – it was realized that
no mention of the death penalty should be made in the declaration, in
order to not decelerate what in the minds of Ellinor Roosewelt and René
Cassin would be a natural progression towards worldwide abolition. Prof.
Schabas compares this with the disappearance of slavery, in the past,
which is also alien to a civilized society and thus has been successfully
outlawed across the world.

While those European countries where the most serious abuse of the
death penalty had been seen rapidly, after WW2, became the leaders of
the abolition movement, others soon followed suite, with countries like
France – where people were executed under the guillotine until 1979 –
now participating in the campaigning against capital punishment in
countries like Iraq. Prof. Schabas describes the declaration of the death
penalty in South Africa, in 1995, as incompatible with the post-Apartheid
constitution, by the South African Constitutional Court, as a tipping point
and feels optimistic even regarding China, where the financial
development allegedly is the sole obstacle to abolition.

Although the death penalty remains in use in some former slave states in
the US, the number of executions has dropped in recent years, new ideas
are appearing in the debate, and polls indicate a declining support of the
death penalty among the public. The US Supreme Court declared juvenile
executions unconstitutional in 2005 and an analysis of the stated reasons
for doing that demonstrates that their rationale actually applies to the
death penalty in general; thus, Prof. Schabas feels that the Supreme Court
is likely to fully outlaw capital punishment within the next few years, if
given proper support and incentive.

Prof. Schabas states that a major challenge coming up during the next
year will be getting abolition of the death penalty through the UN General
Assembly, which failed in 1994 and 1999, in spite of that abolition had
already occurred in a majority of the countries in the world. The EU has
declared that it will battle for abolition when the topic is brought up
again, next year.

Manlio Giordano
June 18, 2009

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