The European Movement Against the Death Penalty: Criminological Perspectives

This paper provides an investigation into the evolution of the criminological arguments against the death penalty from the beginning of the Council of Europe in 1949 to our present time. The issues of the deterrence value of the punishment, the possibility of the execution of the innocent, the failure of proportional retribution, and that the punishment brutalises society, will be explored. These criminological perspectives are then compared with the current human rights standards which remove the death penalty in the Council of Europe and the European Union. The thesis which is proposed is that the origins of the removal of the death penalty in Europe may be more accurately explained from criminological perspectives, rather than human rights values. However, the current removal of the punishment must be viewed as maintained through a symbiosis of criminology and human rights, and that the anti-death penalty discourse which results must be read an a “never-ending story.”