As states that use the death penalty liberally in a world that increasingly favors abolition, the Muslim-majority jurisdictions that are strict exponents of Islamic Law and the People’s Republic of China share a crucial commonality: their frequent use of victim-perpetrator reconciliation agreements to remove convicted murderers from the threat of execution. In both cases, rather than a prisoner’s last chance at escaping execution being recourse to the executive clemency procedure mandated by ICCPR Article 6(4), victim-perpetrator reconciliation agreements fulfill largely the same purpose, together with providing means of compensating victims for economic loss, and enabling the state concerned to reduce execution numbers without formally limiting the death penalty’s scope in law. Utilizing the functionalist approach of comparative law methodology, this presentation compares the thirteen death penalty retentionist nations that have incorporated Islamic Law principles into their positive criminal law with the People’s Republic of China, as to the functions underpinning victim-perpetrator reconciliation agreements in death penalty cases.

Dr. Daniel Pascoe is an Assistant Professor at the School of Law, City University of Hong Kong, where his research interests include criminal procedure and sentencing, comparative and international law perspectives on capital punishment, and transitional justice. Dr. Pascoe graduated with Honours degrees from the Australian National University in Law and in Asian Studies (Indonesian), and received his Doctor of Philosophy in Law from Oxford University in 2013. He has a forthcoming book entitled Last Chance for Life: Clemency in Southeast Asian Death Penalty Cases (Oxford University Press, 2017), and is a Visiting Research Fellow at Fordham Law School during this Spring Semester.

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Photo: Daniel Mitler/Creative Commons

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