The Council of Europe and the death penalty : the relationship of state sovereignty and human rights

This study investigates the processes of the removal of the death penalty within the Council of Europe and its Member States. An evaluation is conducted of the relationship of sovereignty and the death penalty in this region, and the significance of the Council's attempts to penetrate this relationship is analysed. The foremost motivation of this study is to understand how solid the removal of the death penalty is, and to reveal what can be learned from the legislative activity of the Member States and the various Parliamentary Assembly and Committee of Ministers' enactments, and the case-law of the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. It is my hope that this study will help ensure that the death penalty remains removed from this European region

The European Union and the Abolition of the Death Penalty

The European Union has become a leading regional force in the progress towards a world free of state sanctioned judicial killing in the form of the death penalty. This article investigates how the EU has evolved its abolitionist position. It analyzes the development of the region’s internal policy beginning in the European Parliament, to the rejection of the punishment being mandated as a Treaty provision, which evolves into an integral component of the external human rights project. The EU has now formulated technical bilateral and multilateral initiatives to promote abolition worldwide. This is most clearly evidenced in the EU playing an important role in the 2007 United Nations General Assembly Resolution on the moratorium on the use of the death penalty, and the strengthening of the resolution in 2008, 2010, and 2012. This article demonstrates that the EU’s contribution to the abolition of the death penalty is a recognizable success story of human rights, and it is one aspect of the regions’ policies that was rewarded in 2012 with the Nobel Peace Prize

The Council of Europe and the death penalty : the relationship of state sovereignty and human rights

This study investigates the processes of the removal of the death penalty within the Council of Europe and its Member States. An evaluation is conducted of the relationship of sovereignty and the death penalty in this region, and the significance of the Council's attempts to penetrate this relationship is analysed. The foremost motivation of this study is to understand how solid the removal of the death penalty is, and to reveal what can be learned from the legislative activity of the Member States and the various Parliamentary Assembly and Committee of Ministers' enactments, and the case-law of the European Commission of Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights. It is my hope that this study will help ensure that the death penalty remains removed from this European region.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Comity, Finality, and Oklahoma's Lethal Injection Protocol

On October 10, 2014, the Oklahoma State Penitentiary opened its doors to the media to reveal a new state-of-the-art death chamber and announced that it had created an efficient execution facility. To complement the improvements to the prison architecture and the punishment technology, the Oklahoma legislature amended the state’s execution protocol to formulate effective procedures delineating what it considered appropriate pharmacology to render a constitutional execution. This advance in design and regulation, however, has not prevented subsequent maladministration by various members of the Department of Corrections’ execution teams. On January 16, 2015, Charles Warner was executed with the prison receiving and using the wrong drugs. On October 16, 2015, due to further operational mistakes, the District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma declared Richard Glossip’s case to be administratively closed. To investigate these systematic failings, a Multicounty Grand Jury was convened and it considered evidence from stakeholders in the execution process. Its Interim Report provided damning findings, which demonstrate that the death penalty is still struggling for institutional legitimacy. The continuation of botched executions, inappropriate alterations to the protocol, and the claims of punishment experimentation on non-consenting human subjects is contributing to a growing lack of confidence that Oklahoma can maintain a humane form of capital punishment through lethal injection. These unacceptable circumstances occurred primarily as a result of the uncomfortable relationship between the purported “science” of lethal injection and the “constitutional law” of lethal injection, and therefore a clear interpretation of the intellectual interplay of these two disciplines is required. Both the procedural review parameters provided by the principles of comity and finality, and the scientific methodologies of atomism and holism for determining the epistemology of the pharmacology, will prove illuminating. There are compelling questions concerning whether the adjudicative process can produce sound reasoning for assessing the death penalty. We are left with the situation in which there are still, and perhaps always will be, ardent circumstances challenging the constitutionality of Oklahoma’s lethal injection

UPR Project at BCU Philippines Stakeholder Submission

This Stakeholder Report focuses upon capital punishment. We make recommendations to the Government of Philippines on this key issue, implementation of which would also see Philippines moving towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 16 which aims for peaceful and inclusive societies, access to justice for all and effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels. We urge the State to make practical commitments in the fourth cycle of the UPR and maintain its abolition of the death penalty and refrain from reintroducing the punishment

UPR Project at BCU South Africa Stakeholder Submission

This report focuses upon the Government’s international commitments and assesses the extent to which supported recommendations in the UPR third cycle in 2017 have been implemented. Three themes are selected: i. Racism and Hate Crimes ii. HIV/AIDS Prevention and Treatment iii. Child, Early, and Forced Marriage (CEFM

Djibouti Stakeholder Submission - UPR Project at BCU

This Stakeholder Report focuses upon child, early and forced marriage. We make recommendations to the Government of Djibouti on this key issue, implementation of which would see the State move towards achieving Sustainable Development Goal 5 which aims for “gender equality and empowering all women and girls.