The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area Finally, given the times in which we are living, can the death penalty at least be of use in terms of the war on terrorism? In its organized form, terrorism is one of the main threats to world peace today. In a large number of states, emergency laws have been adopted, sometimes to the detriment of fundamental freedoms. This has a harmful effect on the rule of law, which is a necessary guarantee in a democracy. Experience shows that, far from preventing or reducing terrorism, the death penalty simply makes it worse. How can it be believed that the threat of death would make a terrorist recoil when he is ready to perish with his victims in a hijacked plane he is going to fly into buildings or to set off bombs that will tear him to pieces alongside his victims? And why can it not be grasped that for a terrorist the court will always be a stage? By executing him, the justice system turns the terrorist into a hero who sacrificed his life for the cause he supported, if through extreme means. How many young people, inspired by his example, would lend their support to the very organizations the terrorist supported the day after his execution? Finally, morally speaking, democracies make terrorists the object of the deadly violence they love by resorting to the death penalty. Democracies can fight terrorists in ways other than resorting to death, which is futile and degrading. It is worth noting in this respect that great democratic states such as the United Kingdom when faced with the IRA and Spain against ETA never wanted to reinstall the death penalty to fight terrorism. In reality, no one is denying the threat posed by terrorism, but not only does the war against terrorism not require the death penalty, it must actually ensure that it does not resort to it. In the face of terrorism, abolition gives democracy an ethical dimension, essential in such a war. The terrorist kills innocent victims in the name of his ideology; democracy defends freedom and recognizes all lives as sacred, even that of the terrorist. This conflict is one of values in which, eventually, democracy always triumphs and even more so when it upholds, loud and clear, the principles on which it is founded. Faced with crime and cruelty, a democracy’s justice system rejects vengeance and death. It punishes but it does not kill; it prevents the terrorist from harming others but respects his life; by refusing to give him death, democracy guarantees the humanity the terrorist denies through his crimes. Democracy comes out as the moral victor of the test inflicted on it by terrorism. That will not be the least of its victories in the eyes of generations to come.