Conclusion — Abolitionism beyond America and Europe

Abstract

Despite its signal failure in the United States, versions of the European model of death penalty abolition have been successful in other Western European nations, as well as nations that more closely resemble Western European nations in terms of political structure and the influence of intellectual elites. In Belgium, the jurist Edouard Ducpétiaux published his first broadside against capital punishment in 1827 when he was just 23 years old. Entitled On Capital Punishment, the 396-page opus makes Beccarian arguments against the death penalty and other backward penal practices that ‘all the world condemns, yet at the same time tolerates’ (1827:xxi). Ducpétiaux would later become Inspector of Prisons in Belgium, and wrote many treatises and essays on crime prevention and penal reform. In 1863, Belgian authorities agreed on an informal ban on capital punishment. The law would remain on the books, but each person condemned to death would receive a guaranteed royal commutation (perhaps the ultimate form of elite-driven abolition). The agreement held, with exceptions for the execution of one soldier in 1918 and of 242 collaborators in the aftermath of World War II. Only in 1996 did Belgium finally officially repeal its capital punishment laws. That repeal set the stage for Belgium’s later ratification of Additional Protocols 6 and 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights. In 2005, the formal abolition of capital punishment was enshrined in the Belgian constitution.