A new book, Against the Death Penalty: International Initiatives and Implications, fea­tures lead­ing schol­ars on the death penal­ty and their analy­sis of both the pro­mo­tion and demise of the pun­ish­ment around the world. It con­sid­ers the cur­rent efforts to restrict the death penal­ty with­in the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the African Commission, and the Commonwealth Caribbean. It also inves­ti­gates per­spec­tives and ques­tions for reten­tion­ist coun­tries with a focus on the United States, China, Korea, and Taiwan. Among the authors in this com­pendi­um are Roger Hood, William Schabas, Peter Hodgkinson, and DPIC’s Executive Director, Richard Dieter.

Reviews of this new work include:

“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 citizen’s.”– 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 who con­tribute to this book live on a plan­et that is already much too small to tol­er­ate state killings in any of its provinces.” – Franklin E. Zimring, University of California, Berkeley, USA.

The book can be pur­chased here.

(J. Yorke, Ed., ​“Against the Death Penalty: International Initiatives and Implications,” Ashgate Publishers, 2008). See Books and International.

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