This is an important book. With the Johnson and Zimring (2009)book of a few years back, it is one of the two most eye-opening books on the death penalty in Asia ever published. Anyone interested in the worldwide movement away from executions will be glad to have a copy in his or her hands. The volume is edited by Roger Hood, emeritus professor at Oxford and unquestionably among the top death penalty scholars in the world, and Surya Deva, a law professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Included are 14 original chapters written by an all-star cast of 15 authors. Earlier drafts of the papers were presented at a conference in Hong Kong in 2011. The chapters are divided into four sections: “Situating Asia in an International Human Rights Context,” “The Progress So Far,” “Public Opinion and Death Penalty Reform,” and “The Politics of Capital Punishment in Practice.” Four of the chapters focus on China, three on India, two on Japan, one on Singapore, and four on issues that can be applied more generally to Asia as a whole. Each chapter utilizes a numbered outline, making it easy for readers to follow. The editors turn to Saul Lehrfreund of The Death Penalty Project in London to set the table for the volume. For the past quarter century, Lehrfreund and his team have represented scores of death row clients from Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean in courts in their home countries and before international tribunals. His chapter outlines various international treaties and agreements that have served to limit or outright ban the death penalty, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) which was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966. International agreements call for all countries that still use the death penalty to provide information on the frequency and scope of its use (an obligation that China, for one, continues to ignore), to restrict the death penalty to the most serious offenses, and to eliminate provisions that call for mandatory death sentences. Unquestionably, these international agreements are part of the reason why the death penalty worldwide has been increasingly restricted in the past 30 years. Indeed, two additional chapters in the book focus on efforts by abolitionist countries (principally Australia) and national human rights organizations in helping to pave the way for abolition. While it is generally agreed that China continues to carry out more executions than the rest of the world combined, the chapter by Liu Renwen from the Chinese Academy of Social Asian Criminology (2015) 10:251–253 DOI 10.1007/s11417-014-9192-8
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Dec 21, 2021
Olena Uvarova 
