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[ 198 ] asia policy Is Asia the Last Bastion of Capital Punishment? William Schabas A review of David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia New York: Oxford University Press, 2009 u 544 pp. Capital punishment has virtually disappeared from Europe. It is rarely carried out in Africa, except for a few states in the northeast with largely Muslim populations. Aside from the United States, in the western hemisphere there has been only one execution in the past six years. All told, nearly 150 states have abandoned capital punishment, according to the latest United Nations report.1 The remaining forty or so that continue to use the noose (or increasingly, the needle) are in Asia. David T. Johnson and Franklin E. Zimring are scholars in, to use their words, the “relatively new and unpracticed discipline” of the comparative study of death penalty policy (p. 289). This major new study, with a highly original focus, considers the phenomenon of capital punishment from a regional perspective. Their book The Next Frontier: National Development, Political Change, and the Death Penalty in Asia provides insight into both specificities that may explain what appears to be a case of Asian exceptionalism and indications that may contribute to a more universal understanding of the decline, and ultimately abolition of, the death penalty. The authors decided to concentrate on five case studies in East Asia: Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and mainland China. In effect, this focus confines the study to a segment of Asia and sets aside a large and difficult piece of the death penalty puzzle: the Middle East. Perhaps these two fine scholars will provide us with a sequel that explains the lingering enthusiasm for capital punishment in countries such as Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia (as well as in Pakistan, which is not quite in the Middle East). 1 “Capital Punishment and Implementation of the Safeguards Guaranteeing Protection of the Rights of Those Facing the Death Penalty,” Report of the Secretary-General, UN Doc. E/2010/10, para. 31. william schabas is Professor of Human Rights Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway, Director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, and Global Legal Scholar at the University of Warwick. He can be reached at . [ 199 ] book reviews The book’s analytical framework rests on measuring whether the death penalty is “operational,” “exceptional,” “nominal,” or “symbolic.” China is clearly in the operational category, in that it executes more than one person per million of population. Singapore and North Korea also belong to the category. Countries with one execution per 10 million of population are deemed exceptional. Readers may be surprised to learn that the United States is well-entrenched in the exceptional rather than the operational group. In Asia, countries making exceptional use of the death penalty include Thailand and Vietnam. In the nominal category, Johnson and Zimring list states with one execution per 25 million (Malaysia, for example). Of the five countries under examination, one has abolished the death penalty completely and two others are close to abolishing it. The Philippines abolished capital punishment following the Marcos regime and then reintroduced it before abolishing the death penalty again in 2006. South Korea is deemed de facto abolitionist because it has not executed anyone since 1997. Taiwan is likewise de facto abolitionist, having held no executions since 1995. Maturing democratization in all three jurisdictions provides the best explanation for evolution on the subject. All three countries fit well within the overall international trend. Both China and Japan seem to be less obviously part of this abolitionist process. China stands out if only because of the sheer volume of executions. Indeed,thehugenumbers—theactualfiguresareastatesecretandestimates vary considerably, but all seem to agree that the annual count is in the thousands—tend to distort attempts at statistical comparison, a problem the authors address with some innovative analytical approaches. Yet, even China is in motion; the authors signal “changes in death penalty policy that have started to arrive in clusters at the national level of government in the PRC” (p. 277). In Japan, by contrast, the number of executions is really quite small. The new...

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