La peine capitale (document en anglais)

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

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