This edited volume brings together leading scholars on the death penalty within international, regional and municipal law. It considers the intrinsic elements of both the promotion and demise of the punishment around the world, and provides analysis which contributes to the evolving abolitionist discourse. The contributors consider the current developments within the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the African Commission and the Commonwealth Caribbean, and engage with the emergence of regional norms promoting collective restriction and renunciation of the punishment. They investigate perspectives and questions for retentionist countries, focusing on the United States, China, Korea and Taiwan, and reveal the iniquities of contemporary capital judicial systems. Emphasis is placed on the issues of transparency of municipal jurisdictions, the jurisprudence on the 'death row phenomenon' and the changing nature of public opinion. The volume surveys and critiques the arguments used to scrutinize the death penalty to then offer a detailed analysis of possible replacement sanctions.

About the Author
Jon Yorke, Senior Lecturer in Law, BCU School of Law, Birmingham City University, UK

Reviews
'With cool scholarship and passionate moral commitment, this book convincingly signposts the steady world-wide progress towards abolition and the elimination of the need perceived by states to show their authority by killing their citizens.' Justice Albie Sachs, Constitutional Court of South Africa 'The appearance of this book is something of a landmark in the evolution of the movement it documents. The scope of this collection reflects the extraordinary degree to which the abolition of the death penalty has become a human rights movement of global proportions. All this happened quickly. Since 1980, the movement to restrict state execution was first expanded from national prerogative to regional minimum standard of civilized governance. The success of this movement in Europe has only intensified the effort to banish executions worldwide. Many leading figures in this global movement contribute to this volume, but the topics and authors in these pages go well beyond rounding up the usual suspects. All who contribute to this book live on a planet that is already much too small to tolerate state killings in any of its provinces.' Professor Franklin E. Zimring, University of California, Berkeley Co-author of The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia 'Against the Death Penalty: International Initiatives and Implications makes a positive contribution to the literature on the death penalty...[this] book reminds us that the fight to eliminate capital punishment in the United States cannot be properly understood without awareness of how other regions of the world or individual nations treat the death penalty.' The Law and Politics Book Review 'Jon Yorke's book, Against the Death Penalty is an edited collection of a number of very thoughtful contributions to the capital punishment debate, nationally and internationally.' Criminal Law Forum



Book Information
ISBN 9781138260047
Author Jon Yorke
Format Paperback
Page Count 334
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 453g