Observatoire des droits humains (anglais seulement)

Why the death penalty is incompatible with democracy

(Version anglaise seulement)

par Eric Heinze, Professor of Law, Queen Mary University of London

In the Athens of 399BC, a public assembly voted to put one of the city’s outstanding citizens to death: Socrates, one of the fathers of western philosophy. They convicted Socrates on trumped-up political charges, yet he accepted this sentence because it was democratically adopted by a majority of his fellow citizens.

Today’s democracies were designed precisely to avoid such miscarriages. Although many of them still imposed the death penalty until relatively recently, modern constitutions included…

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