Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on the contributors
- 1 Capital punishment: improve it or remove it?
- 2 International law and the death penalty: reflecting or promoting change?
- 3 Doctors and the death penalty: ethics and a cruel punishment
- 4 Replacing the death penalty: the vexed issue of alternative sanctions
- 5 Religion and the death penalty in the United States: past and present
- 6 On botched executions
- 7 Death as a penalty in the Shari'ā
- 8 Abolishing the death penalty in the United States: an analysis of institutional obstacles and future prospects
- 9 Capital punishment in the United States: moratorium efforts and other key developments
- 10 The experience of Lithuania's journey to abolition
- 11 The death penalty in South Korea and Japan: ‘Asian values’ and the debate about capital punishment?
- 12 Georgia, former republic of the USSR: managing abolition
- 13 Capital punishment in the Commonwealth Caribbean: colonial inheritance, colonial remedy?
- 14 Public opinion and the death penalty
- 15 Capital punishment: meeting the needs of the families of the homicide victim and the condemned
- Index
2 - International law and the death penalty: reflecting or promoting change?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Notes on the contributors
- 1 Capital punishment: improve it or remove it?
- 2 International law and the death penalty: reflecting or promoting change?
- 3 Doctors and the death penalty: ethics and a cruel punishment
- 4 Replacing the death penalty: the vexed issue of alternative sanctions
- 5 Religion and the death penalty in the United States: past and present
- 6 On botched executions
- 7 Death as a penalty in the Shari'ā
- 8 Abolishing the death penalty in the United States: an analysis of institutional obstacles and future prospects
- 9 Capital punishment in the United States: moratorium efforts and other key developments
- 10 The experience of Lithuania's journey to abolition
- 11 The death penalty in South Korea and Japan: ‘Asian values’ and the debate about capital punishment?
- 12 Georgia, former republic of the USSR: managing abolition
- 13 Capital punishment in the Commonwealth Caribbean: colonial inheritance, colonial remedy?
- 14 Public opinion and the death penalty
- 15 Capital punishment: meeting the needs of the families of the homicide victim and the condemned
- Index
Summary
International law – the law of nations or jus gentium – is a relatively recent body of law, whose beginnings are usually associated with the rise of nation states in the seventeenth century. It was not traditionally concerned with the rights of individuals, subject to a few exceptions: the rights of religious minorities and, in the case of the laws of armed conflict, the protection of civilian non-combatants in occupied territories and of wounded soldiers and prisoners. International law's principal interest was with the reciprocal rights of sovereign states, as set out in treaties or customary rules, and was concerned with such matters as diplomatic immunity, borders and fishing rights. Only in the mid-twentieth century did international law begin to shift its focus to the individual as the beneficiary of international law, and to the creation of rights of individuals vis-à-vis their own states rather than rights of states vis-à-vis each other. The distinct category of international law known as international human rights law that emerged following the Second World War has grown into one of the pillars of the international legal system.
From the earliest years, the question of capital punishment found itself very much at the core of the international human rights law debate, despite persistent claims by some states that it was a ‘criminal law issue’ and as such not particularly relevant to human rights standard-setting.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Capital PunishmentStrategies for Abolition, pp. 36 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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