News and Developments 2009: International

The Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus, recently featured an article entitled, “Death Penalty Lessons from Asia,” written by David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring. The article is based in part on the authors' book, The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia.  Johnson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawaii.  Zimring is the William G. Simon Professor of Law and Wolfen Scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.  The article takes an in-depth look at the practice of the death penalty in Asian jurisdictions over the last few decades. Drawing parallels with the death penalty movement in Europe, Johnson and Zimring present economic development, political change and public opinion as influential to the practice of capital punishment in Asian countries. Their book is based on 5 major case studies of capital punishment in Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and China, and 7 shorter case studies of capital punishment in North Korea, Hong Kong and Macao, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, and India. 

The Death Penalty Project of London recently published A Penalty Without Legitimacy: The Mandatory Death Penalty In Trinidad And Tobago (2009), a collection of papers presented at a conference in Trinidad & Tobago in March 2009.  The papers include a study of opinions of judges, prosecutors, and counsel on the use of the mandatory death penalty in Trinidad and Tobago and ways to bring its practice in line with other countries that have retained the death penalty.  The report also includes contributions by Jeffrey Fagan on the subject of deterrence and  Douglas Mendes on international and comparative perspectives on the death penalty.  The Death Penalty Project hopes that the findings presented in the report will stimulate discussion about the possibility of abolishing the mandatory nature of the death penalty.  For more information about this report click here.

John Bellinger, who served as legal adviser to the State Department from 2005 to 2009, has called on President Obama to assist in the review of the death penalty cases of foreign nationals who were denied rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.  The U.S. has ratified the Vienna Convention and the Protocol that provides for resolution of disputes in the International Court of Justice in the Hague (ICJ).  Mexico brought a suit to this court on behalf of its citizens on death row in various states because the U.S. had not provided the defendants with access to their consulates at the time of their arrest.  The ICJ held that the cases of the Mexican nationals should be reviewed before any executions went forward.  President George W. Bush ordered state courts  to review the cases, but this order was ultimately blocked in the U.S. Supreme Court.  Mr. Bellinger said that President Obama could comply with our obligations under the treaty through legislation: "The Obama administration's best option would be to seek narrowly tailored legislation that would authorize the president to order review of these cases and override, if necessary, any state criminal laws limiting further appeals, in order to comply with the United Nations Charter," he wrote recently in the N.Y. Times.

Ecuador is demanding the return of one of their citizens from Florida’s death row because they maintain he was taken from Ecuador illegally. The inmate, Nelson Serrano Saenz, is a dual citizen of the U.S. and Ecuador. Ecuador says he should have never been taken from their country by Florida officials, calling the arrest a “kidnapping” and accusing the U.S. government of physical maltreatment of Serrano as well.  Ecuador does not have the death penalty and will not extradite fugitives who face the punishment in other countries. ''The issue is not his guilt or innocence,'' said Deputy Ecuadorean Interior Minister Franco Sanchez. ''This is called a kidnapping, not an arrest.''  U.S. authorities maintain that they did nothing improper and that Serrano’s dual citizenship status allowed them to bring him back. The Organization of American States, to which both countries belong, has since recommended the case to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in Costa Rica, after first finding that Ecuador had illegally detained and deported Serrano.  

A new book on international developments in capital punishment, The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia, is now available from Oxford University Press.  Authors David Johnson, an expert on law and society in Asia, and Franklin Zimring, a senior authority on capital punishment, utilize their research to identify the critical factors affecting the future of the death penalty in Asia. They found that when an authoritarian state experienced democratic reform, such as in Taiwan and South Korea, the rate of executions dropped sharply.  Johnson and Zimring also found that politics, instead of culture or tradition, is the major obstacle to the end of capital punishment in Asia.