ABSTRACT
Article 2(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights 1950 (ECHR) states ‘[e]veryone’s right to life shall be protected by law. No one shall be deprived of his life intentionally save in the execution of a sentence of a court following his conviction of a crime for which this penalty is provided by law.’2 Although, as A.H. Robertson noted, the text was ‘careful to protect the legality of capital punishment,’ (Robertson 1965, 205) from the early life of the Council of Europe there were stalwart parliamentarians who would not allow the human rights organisation to completely reject the anti-death penalty sentiments which had emerged from the Enlightenment.3 Over the proceeding 30 years, the Council held numerous debates and gradually the arguments against the punishment solidified and instruments were adopted for restriction and abolition. The first regional curtailment of the punishment occurred in 1983, when article 1 of Protocol No. 6 to the ECHR provides for the removal of the death penalty in times of peace, but article 2 concedes that states may ‘make provision in its law for the death penalty in respect of acts committed in time of war or of imminent threat of war.’4 More debates followed as the wartime exception proved problematical and so the abolitionist discourse became more complex with techniques employed to encourage regional abolitionism which would be extended to the new member states from Central and Eastern European countries post-1994. Then in 2002, Protocol No. 13 to the ECHR
was adopted and article 1 decrees that in all circumstances, ‘[t]he death penalty shall be abolished. No one shall be condemned to such penalty or executed.’5
