Capital Punishment, Human Rights and the UN1

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 its 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
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Details on location etc. obtained from http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/index/hrsj-index

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.

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 1940s a time when capital punishment was practiced in most countries and the executions of Nazis after the Nrnberg 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 Ren 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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