Capital Punishment On The Right To Life: An International Human Rights Discourse
- IJLLR Journal
- 4 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Richa Kapoor, Amity University
ABSTRACT
Capital punishment remains one of the most controversial topics in the modern criminal justice and the discourse of international human rights. Although number of States continue to hold on to the death penalty as a form of serious punishment to the most serious offences, the growing international human right law is raising more questions as to whether the death penalty can be afforded to the most serious offences and as to whether it is compatible with the basic right to life. The right to life is regarded as the highest and non-derogable human right, and the conceptual basis of the contemporary jurisprudence of human rights. This paper is a critical analysis of the death penalty in the light of the right of life as propounded under the international human-rights instruments and construed by the international and regional human-rights watchdogs.
This paper evaluates how the right to life has developed over the years under important international documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and its Second Optional Protocol that is targeted at the end of the death penalty. Even though the international law does not establish the unilateral ban on death penalty, the use of capital punishment is subjected to the very strict requirements, where it can be used in cases of the most heinous offences and in the presence of the most stringent procedural safeguards. The article discusses the ways in which such limitations, in conjunction with evolutional views at the United Nations Human Rights Committee, point to an evident normative change with an abolitionist inclination.
In addition, the paper discusses jurisprudence of international and regional human-right systems such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American system which have played a major role in the abolitionist movement in the world. These agencies have highlighted the human dignity, disproportion and the irreversibility of the death penalty and have added more and more attributes to it, outlining it as inhumane, cruel, and degrading punishment. The particular focus is made on the psychological trauma of the death-row imprisonment and the possibility of irreversible wrongful convictions, which ultimately harm the principle of the right to life.
The arguments by the retentionist States have also been critically assessed in the paper especially the arguments of deterrence, retributive justice, cultural relativism, and state sovereignty. It shows the absence of definitive empirical research about the deterrent effect of capital punishment and that sovereignty by the state cannot be employed in such a way as to violate fundamental human-rights commitments.
Lastly, the paper follows the international pattern of abolition, which is seen in the rising number of abolitionist States, resolutions adopted by international bodies to impose moratoria on executions, and the growing popularity of abolition as an indicator of human-rights observance. The paper concludes by saying that, even though capital punishment is yet to be done away with universally under the international law, its existence continues to become more and more incompatible with the transforming meaning of the right to life. This paper contends that the international human-rights system is gradually shifting towards the position of acknowledging the abolishment of the death penalty as one of the measures of ensuring that human dignity and universal right-of-life protection.
Keywords: Death Penalty, Right to Life, Human Rights, ICCPR, Capital Punishment, International Law.
