La peine capitale (document en anglais)
Dissertation : La peine capitale (document en anglais). Recherche parmi 300 000+ dissertationsPar dissertation • 24 Janvier 2013 • Dissertation • 468 Mots (2 Pages) • 1 007 Vues
Capital punishment
Dying out
Little by little, countries are ditching1 the
death penalty
On September 19th Abdul Hamid al-Fakki, a
Sudanese, was executed in Saudi Arabia for the
crime of “sorcery”. On September 21st Troy Davis,
a black man convicted of shooting an off-duty white
policeman, was executed in the American state of
Georgia. Protests that the evidence against him was
flawed proved fruitless.
Despite these cases the death penalty, on the
statute books since the days of Hammurabi, is disappearing
in much of the world. More than two-thirds
of countries have done away with it either in law or
in practice. The latest is Benin. In August the west
African country committed itself to abolishing capital
punishment permanently. The number of countries
that carry out judicial killings fell from 41 in
1995 to 23 in 2010, according to Amnesty International,
a pressure group. China (chiefly), Iran, North
Korea, and Yemen accounted for most of the executions.
Votes against the death penalty at the UN
General Assembly have passed with big and growing
majorities since 2007. Capital punishment has virtually
gone in Europe (only Belarus still uses it, most
recently in July). This year China whittled down2
its list of crimes punishable by death.
Yet for all the apparent momentum, capital punishment
remains entrenched in the Middle East and
north Africa, and in parts of Asia, notably China.
Jacqueline Macalesher of Penal Reform International,
a lobby group, thinks the Arab spring could
be a new spur to abolition, though she worries that
executing political enemies may prove attractive in
the short run.
The other big exception is America, where
two-thirds of states still have the death penalty.
A leading Republican candidate for the presidency,
Rick Perry, is governor of Texas, the state that uses
it most. The state has carried out a record 236 executions
in his nearly 11 years as governor. Mr Perry
says
...