ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the discourse on capital punishment has, in the last 25 years, been transformed from an issue of criminal justice, crime control, public opinion and culture, to be determined by each state as a matter of national sovereignty, into an issue of universal human rights. The mandatory death penalty is being increasingly found to be an unconstitutional form of punishment and the United Nations Human Rights Committee has declared that it is a violation of Article 6(1) of the ICCPR. Human rights advocates also challenge the claim that the death penalty must be retained, especially its enforcement through executions, as an essential weapon of criminal justice, without which there would be a greater incidence of murder and other capital offences. The facts laid out above have shown that over the past quarter of a century a 'new dynamic' has been at work to propagate this philosophy by shifting the debate about capital punishment.
