Asia and the Death Penalty: Reassessing the Prospects for Abolition

In 2009, David Johnson and Franklin Zimring predicted that: '[o]n current evidence, the abolition of capital punishment in Asia is not a question of whether but of when, and the critical issues seem to concern the pace and processes of change rather than the direction changes will take or their eventual end point'. The authors identified the 'powerful and primary role of democratization', particularly as a consequence of economic development, as the clearest causal factor in stimulating change in execution policy. There may be anomalies, such as in Japan, and cases where economic development is not accompanied by democratisation, such as China and Vietnam. Because of these, the process of decline may be uneven. Nevertheless, the authors maintained that the road to abolition, over an extended time frame, ran in one direction only. This article reviews progress towards abolition in Asia in the period 2010-20. It argues that trends, which appeared well-established in Asia a decade ago and augured well for abolition (such as the overall decline in the number of executions, the poor social reputation of capital punishment among the region's elites and popular wishes for democratic government), seem, in the second decade of the 21st century, to be far less certain. New developments, such as China's growing assertiveness and influence in international forums, global economic instability in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and anti-democratic developments and populist resurgences across Asia, cast doubt on previous predictions about the unidirectional move to abolition. This article outlines three central reasons why the prediction of Asia's downward trajectory for capital punishment requires revision. First, domestic developments in countries such as Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh and India suggest we can no longer assume the overall rate of executions across Asia will slow. Where the death penalty remains a legal option, as it does in many Asian countries, resuming or continuing executions will remain among the repertoire of responses to social crises and political insecurity. Second, there are reasons to question whether Asian political elites still value the reputational salience of 'belonging' to the group of abolitionist countries. This is significant, given that death penalty reform is held to be an elite-led process. Third, in China and Vietnam, which are two of the world's most steadfast proponents of the death penalty, it is not plausible to assume the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy "” and with it the end of capital punishment. Before examining recent developments and explaining what they signal for the future of the death penalty in Asia, this article explains why the abolition of the death penalty is regarded as the signature issue of the human rights movement.