With the strengthening focus worldwide on human rights, there has been a rapid increase in recent years in the number of countries that have completely abolished the death penalty. This is in recognition that it is a violation of the right to life and the right to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. There has, simultaneously, been pressure on countries that still retain capital punishment to ensure that they at least apply the United Nations minimum human rights safeguards established to protect the rights of those facing the death penalty.
This book shows that the majority of Asian countries have been particularly resistant to the abolitionist movement and tardy in accepting their responsibility to uphold the safeguards. The essays contained in this volume provide an in-depth analysis of changes in the scope and application of the death penalty in Asia with a focus on China, India, Japan, and Singapore. They explain the extent to which these nations still fail to accept capital punishment as a human rights issue, identify impediments to reform, and explore the prospects that Asian countries will eventually embrace the goal of worldwide abolition of capital punishment.
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To what extent does popular support for discontinuation of the death penalty have to be presented for abolitionist laws to be legitimate? Do changes in public attitudes toward the death penalty necessarily precede abolition, or do cultural shifts occur later as a by-product of bold legal or political reforms? In raising these and other questions, this volume not only adds to our understanding of capital punishment in an area of obvious interest, but opens new and promising directions for further inquiry. * Stephen Noakes, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books *
SITUATING ASIA IN AN INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS CONTEXT ;
1. State
Execution: Is Asia Different and Why? ;
2. The Impact and Importance of
International Human Rights Standards: Asia in World Perspective ;
3.
Examining China's Response to the Global Campaign against the Death Penalty ;
4. The Role of National Human Rights Institutions in Abolishing Capital
Punishment: A Critical Evaluation ;
5. The Role of Abolitionist Nations in
stopping the use of the Death Penalty in Asia: The Case of Australia ; THE
PROGRESS SO FAR ;
6. Recent Reforms and Prospects in China ;
7. Abolition of
the Death Penalty in India: Constitutional and Human Rights Dimensions ;
8.
Singapore's Death Penalty: The Beginning of the End? ;
9. Progress and
Problems in Japanese Capital Punishment ; PUBLIC OPINION AND DEATH PENALTY
REFORM ;
10. Capital Punishment Reform, Public Opinion, and Penal Elitism in
the People's Republic of China ;
11. Challenging the Japanese Government's
Approach to the Death Penalty ; THE POLITICS OF CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN
PRACTICE ;
12. Suspending Death in Chinese Capital Cases: The Road to Reform
;
13. Death Penalty in the 'Rarest of Rare' Cases: A Critique of Judicial
Choice-Making ;
14. Don't be Cruel: The 'Death Row Phenomenon' and India's
'Delay' Jurisprudence
Roger Hood is a Research Associate, formerly Professor of Criminology and Fellow of All Souls College, and former Director of the Centre for Criminological Research, All Souls College. He received the Cesare Beccaria Medal in 2011 from the International Society for Social Defence and a Humane Criminal Policy for his contributions towards the abolition of the death penalty and in 2012 the European Society of Criminology Award for a lifetime contribution as a European criminologist. His research has had four main strands: the death penalty; race and sentencing; the parole system; and the history of the emergence of penal policy.
Dr Surya Deva is an Associate Professor at the School of Law of City University of Hong Kong. Dr Deva's primary research interests lie in Corporate Social Responsibility, Indo-Chinese Constitutional Law, International Human Rights, Globalisation, and Sustainable Development. He has published numerous book chapters and journal articles in these areas.
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