TRENDS IN THE USE OF IMPRISONMENT Death penalty Progress continues towards the global abolition of the death penalty, and a record number of UN member states – 120 out of 193 – voted in favour of a moratorium on its use at the UN General Assembly in December 2018. Thirty-five states voted against a moratorium and 32 abstained.93 This is an improvement from December 2016, when 117 states supported the resolution.94 Several countries changed their vote in favour of the resolution for the first time, including Pakistan, Dominica, Libya and Malaysia. Currently, 103 of 193 states have abolished the death penalty for all crimes and 139 have abolished the death penalty in law or practice.95 Other positive developments in the past year were Burkina Faso96 and Malaysia97 moving towards the abolition of the death penalty, and in September 2018, The Gambia ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), committing to the full abolition of the death penalty.98 As of March 2019, 86 states had ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the ICCPR.99 In June 2018, the Caribbean Court of Justice in Barbados unanimously declared the mandatory death penalty for murder unconstitutional.100 Harm Reduction International found a positive downward trend in executions worldwide for drug offences, reporting a decrease of 90 per cent since 2015. This was driven in part by a significant fall in the use of the death penalty for drug offences in Iran.101 Currently, at least 35 countries and territories still maintain the death penalty for drug offences and four of these carried out executions in 2018: Iran, China, Saudi Arabia and Singapore.102 In a worrying trend, the Sri Lanka Cabinet approved a move to bring back the death penalty for drug-related crimes,103 and the Bangladeshi government approved a draft bill – the Narcotics Control Act 2018 – which made the manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine punishable by death.104 (See Drugs and imprisonment, page 18). In the US, death sentences and executions decreased in number for the 18th consecutive year and, for the first time in 25 years, fewer than 2,500 people faced active death sentences.105 Washington became the 20th state to abolish the death penalty, on the grounds that it was imposed in an ‘arbitrary and racially biased manner and fails to serve any legitimate penological goal’.106 The Governor of California introduced a moratorium on executions that will last as long as his current term of office (until 2023).107 Despite these positive trends, there were reports of a resumption of executions in Botswana,108 and in June 2018, Thailand executed a 26-year-old man for aggravated murder in the country’s first execution since August 2009.109 According to Amnesty International, Japan saw an ‘unprecedented spate of executions’ in July 2018, with the execution of 13 members of the religious cult Aum Shinrikyo (Aum), who were found responsible for a deadly sarin gas attack in Tokyo in 1995.110 In August 2018, Taiwan carried out its first execution since 2016, thereby putting an end to its de facto moratorium.111 There were several reports in 2018 of death sentences being handed down to foreign nationals in Iraq for terrorism-related activities. For example, in May 2018, a Belgian national was given a death sentence by the court in Iraq.112 (See Foreign national prisoners, minorities and Indigenous peoples, page 21). New laws in several countries resulted in an expansion of the scope of the death penalty for certain crimes. In April 2018, Mauritania adopted a law making the death penalty mandatory for ‘blasphemous speech’ and ‘sacrilegious acts’.113 In April 2018, India passed an executive ordinance approving the death penalty for anyone convicted of raping a child under the age of 12 years.114 The use of the death penalty continues to divide public opinion. Though it was abolished in the Philippines in 2006, there have been calls to reinstate it – particularly in the context of President Duterte’s ‘war on drugs’. In a national survey, the Commission on Human Rights of the Philippines interviewed approximately 2,000 people about the use of the death penalty in relation to drug crime.115 While 47 per cent Penal Reform International and Thailand Institute of Justice | Global Prison Trends 2019 of respondents called for the death penalty for rape under the influence of drugs, only 33 per cent supported it for other serious crimes related to illegal drugs. Among those who disagreed with the death penalty, at least 42 per cent cited religious reasons and 21 per cent thought it possible for rehabilitation to take place.116 In Belarus, 13 people were executed while their cases were under examination by the UN Human Rights Committee (the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR recognises the competence of the UN Human Rights Committee in considering individual cases of alleged violations of rights contained in the ICCPR).117 In all of these cases, the Committee had issued interim measures of protection to halt executions from taking place while the cases were being considered. While waiting for their execution – often for years on end – death row prisoners are frequently detained in particularly harsh conditions, irrespective of whether or not they present an actual security risk. The severe emotional distress prisoners experience during the lengthy wait for execution has been found to violate the international prohibition against torture. In 2018, the Pope joined the debate, stating that executions were unacceptable in all cases as they were ‘an attack’ on human dignity.118 In Japan, prisoners are given just a few hours’ notice before execution.119 In the state of Virginia in the US, conditions were so bad on death row that a federal district court issued an injunction in 2018 to remedy the situation after a lawsuit challenging the conditions was filed.120 The applicants – prisoners on death row – argued that their conditions violated the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Conditions included 23 hours a day alone in cells of 6.6 metres; no contact visits; no congregate meals; no congregate recreation, religious, educational or social programming; only three showers a week; and just five hours of outdoor recreation per week in separate, isolated cages.121 | 15