Bessler's "Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights"

The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights: International Law, State Practice, and the Emerging Abolitionist Norm, by John Bessler, University of Baltimore, is due out next month from Cambridge University Press, in its series, ASIL Studies in International Legal Theory:

The Death Penalty's Denial of Fundamental Human Rights details how capital punishment violates universal human rights-to life; to be free from torture and other forms of cruelty; to be treated in a non-arbitrary, non-discriminatory manner; and to dignity. In tracing the evolution of the world's understanding of torture, which now absolutely prohibits physical and psychological torture, the book argues that an immutable characteristic of capital punishment-already outlawed in many countries and American states-is that it makes use of death threats. Mock executions and other credible death threats, in fact, have long been treated as torturous acts. When crime victims are threatened with death and are helpless to prevent their deaths, for example, courts routinely find such threats inflict psychological torture. With simulated executions and non-lethal corporal punishments already prohibited as torturous acts, death sentences and real executions, the book contends, must be classified as torturous acts, too.

Here is a post on the book in which Professor Bessler explains how Cesare Beccaria and other Enlightenment thinkers understood torture differently than we do today.  And here is an appearance by Professor Bessler on German TV during the recently concluded 8th World Congress Against the Death Penalty.  Finally, here is the book’s TOC:

Introduction
1. The death penalty: from draconian legal codes to the enlightenment
2. The abolitionist movement: state practice, international law, and global progress
3. Death threats and the law of torture: the death penalty's inherently cruel and torturous characteristics
4. Human dignity and the law's evolution: prohibiting capital punishment through a jus cogens norm
Conclusion

 

--Dan Ernst