DespoleA influência do sistema de direitos humanos da ONU nas reformas da pena de morte na China

Abstract

Since 2007, China has advanced several reforms to restrict and control the application of the death penalty. This is rather puzzling if we consider China’s historical use of the capital punishment, as well as its widespread public support. This article contributes to the debate on the causes of these reforms by testing the relevance of the hypothesis that the United Nations Human Rights System (UNHRS) successfully socialised China into a more lenient understanding of the death penalty, which in turn would have prompted those reforms. The results partially confirm this hypothesis. There is strong evidence that the UNHRS might have socialised China into a particular aspect of these reforms — the cancellation of some economic and non-violent crimes —, but it was not responsible for triggering these reforms and it failed to socialise China into conducting a number of other specific death penalty reforms. Despite not being responsible for the totality of the reforms, this study affirmed the relevance of the possibility that the UNHRS influenced part of them, which raises the necessity of considering this factor to arrive at a comprehensive explanatory model. Keywords: China; death penalty; human rights; United Nations