A new book, Against the Death Penalty: International Initiatives and Implications, features leading scholars on the death penalty and their analysis of both the promotion and demise of the punishment around the world. It considers the current efforts to restrict the death penalty within the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the African Commission, and the Commonwealth Caribbean. It also investigates perspectives and questions for retentionist countries with a focus on the United States, China, Korea, and Taiwan. Among the authors in this compendium are Roger Hood, William Schabas, Peter Hodgkinson, and DPIC’s Executive Director, Richard Dieter.

Reviews of this new work include:

“With cool scholarship and passionate moral commitment, this book convincingly signposts the steady world-wide progress towards abolition and the elimination of the need perceived by states to show their authority by killing their citizen’s.”– Justice Albie Sachs, Constitutional Court of South Africa.

“The appearance of this book is something of a landmark in the evolution of the movement it documents. The scope of this collection reflects the extraordinary degree to which the abolition of the death penalty has become a human rights movement of global proportions… All who contribute to this book live on a planet that is already much too small to tolerate state killings in any of its provinces.”–Franklin E. Zimring, University of California, Berkeley, USA.

The book can be purchased here.

(J. Yorke, Ed., “Against the Death Penalty: International Initiatives and Implications,” Ashgate Publishers, 2008). See Books and International.