Tímarit lögfræðinga - 01.10.1989, Side 14

At last, Protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights of
1983, banned the death penalty from the list of permissible penal
sanctions with the exception only of certain acts committed in time
of war, or of imminent threat of war. The European Convention on
Extradition of 1957 provides in Art. 11 that extradition may be refused,
unless the requesting party offers such assurances as the requested
party considers sufficient to guarantee that the death penalty will not
be carried out.
c) Unfortunately, the number of states having formally abolished
the death penalty remains a small minority. Only 32 states have done
so. Almost all Western European states, including all the Nordic
countries, are among them. Iceland abolished the death penalty as
early as 1928. Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the majority of
Latin-American countries repealed it too. 16 states do not apply it de
facto; Belgium, Greece and Ireland are among them. On the other
hand the death penalty is maintained and carried out in USA, and,
with the exception of a few states, in alniost all Asian and African
countries. It is applied in all socialist states, with the exception of
the German Democratic Republic that abolished it last year. In
Hungary and Poland the death penalty is actually under debate. Hopes
that the Soviet Union would repeal it in the course of its criminal law
reform have disappeared. At a Congress on the Death Penalty held
by the International Association of Penal Law, together with its three
sister Association in the International Institute of Superior Studies
on Criminal Science in Siracuse in 1987, many participants opposed
the abolition of the most serious penalty, especially those from the
Asian and African states. These were motivated both by authoritarian
doctrines favoured in dictatorial regimes and by religious beliefs
defending capital punishment, primarily in the Islamic world. The
death penalty has raged terribly in Iran, where it is used against
heretics, followers of other religions, against sexual offenders, drug-
dealers and political opponents.
2. Imprisonment. — a) In the majority of states today imprisonment
is the most important penalty. It is even more frequently applied than
the fine which otherwise has won much ground since the Second World
War. Against this kind of traditionalism a strong counter-philosophy
is on the move. It can be found in all Westem European states where
the principle of “ultima ratio” is considered a central point of progres-
sive criminal policy. So in the Federal Republic of Germany only 18
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