Capital Punishment and the Geopolitical Ambiguity of Death

Lebanon is taking an important step toward safeguarding the individual right to life by abolishing the death penalty, at a time when the region lives to the rhythm of news of war, death and destruction, in a reality that at times resembles the collective execution of human beings.

The abolition of the death penalty is not merely a legal amendment or a legislative measure. It is a human-rights act that places the right to life above the state’s right to punish and sides with the individual against the power to inflict death. From this perspective, Lebanon’s decision to embark on this path carries significance beyond the legal text itself by strengthening the protection of the individual. Abolishing the death penalty thus amounts to recognizing that the state should not kill in the name of the law, even as wars, conflicts and political and social collapse turn death into a daily practice both within and outside the law.

This is where the significance of Lebanon’s move becomes clear, following a de facto moratorium on executions in place since 2004, in a region where human rights are rarely respected. Lebanese Justice Minister Adel Nassar described the abolition of capital punishment as “an essential message in favor of fundamental rights.”

Among the member states of the Arab League, Djibouti removed the death penalty from its Penal Code in 1995, although the country is located in the Horn of Africa. In the Middle East, Israel abolished capital punishment for ordinary crimes in 1954, while retaining it for a number of exceptional offenses, including treason in wartime, genocide, crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people.

Last March, the Israeli Knesset adopted a law imposing the death penalty for certain murders classified as terrorist offenses committed by residents of the West Bank, while excluding Israeli citizens and residents of Israel, with the possibility, under certain exceptional circumstances defined by the military courts, of replacing it with life imprisonment. Promoted by the far right, this policy regained political momentum after the war that followed October 7, 2023. In practice, its application is aimed primarily at Palestinians subject to military courts. Israeli and international human-rights organizations have criticized the measure, arguing that it entrenches a two-tier justice system.

This is not merely a philosophy rooted in the defense of human rights. It is also an assertion that human life does not lose its value because of a crime, because of a person’s identity, or because of their political, sectarian, geographical or ethnic position. In a region where human beings are often reduced to numbers in casualty tolls running into the thousands, defending the individual right to life becomes a political position in the fullest sense.

The paradox, however, is that the abolition of the death penalty is taking place in a regional environment where death is inflicted on a massive scale. The shift from individual execution carried out by the state pursuant to a judicial ruling to collective execution produced by war and violence is one of the contradictions that most starkly reveals the crisis of a violent Middle East.

The abolition of capital punishment should therefore not be regarded as the end of the debate, but as the beginning of a larger question: how can the right to life be transformed from a legal principle that protects the individual from the state into a political and moral value capable of protecting human beings from war, violence, authoritarianism and the collapse of the state?

This is the geopolitical ambiguity of death.

In Syria, death sentences in absentia have been issued against former President Bashar al-Assad on charges of premeditated murder, torture, arbitrary detention and crimes against humanity, among other accusations related to the war he waged against his own people for nearly fourteen years. Alongside him, senior figures of his regime involved in mass killings, forced displacement and the torture of prisoners have also been convicted, in the context of a deeply ambiguous political transition in which the concept of justice becomes entangled with the imperatives of political revenge and the settling of scores.

In Israel, death takes another form. Violence is exercised in contexts described as terrorism, while the killing of the Palestinian human being becomes an instrument in an existential and security conflict.

All of this makes the issue more complex still, as death and execution take different forms once death itself becomes a political instrument. Yet the human being remains, in the end, the weakest link.

While Lebanon moves toward abolishing capital punishment, killings, executions and bombings continue around it and on its own territory, outside the logic of state sovereignty and the law, or under various political and security labels. Yet the principle of civilization presupposes that no one can claim such a right in absolute terms.

But what does justice mean in times of war and upheaval? And what form of accountability can truly be achieved while crimes and political and financial settlements continue?

The abolition of the death penalty nevertheless opens new horizons for justice. Lebanon can now renew its request for the extradition of Igor Grechushkin, a Russian-Cypriot national who operated the Rhosus, the vessel that transported the ammonium nitrate linked to the August 2020 Beirut port explosion. A Bulgarian court had refused his extradition after deeming Lebanon’s assurances that he would not face the death penalty insufficient. With the abolition of capital punishment, one of the main legal obstacles to a renewed extradition request has been removed.

In the hope of becoming a regional example, Lebanon is also considering whether to refuse the extradition to Syria of former regime officials who would be tried before courts that continue to issue death sentences, if it is able to do so given the scale of foreign interference.

From this perspective, abolishing the death penalty is no longer merely a criminal-justice matter. It becomes a coherent position against a political culture that turns death into a means of reproducing power or eliminating opponents. The difference between execution and political violence does not always lie in the outcome, but in the authority that grants itself the legitimacy to carry it out.

Capital punishment disappears from the law while surviving within a geopolitical landscape in which it is practiced in other forms.

In principle, abolishing the death penalty is a democratic and legal act, and it also falls within the principle of mercy embraced by most revealed religions. But this alone is no longer sufficient for it to be described as a democratic act. Democracy is not measured only by what the state does inside parliament or inside the courtroom that replaces a death sentence with life imprisonment, but also by its ability to protect life beyond those walls.

Democracy does not consist only in preventing the state from executing an individual pursuant to a judicial ruling. It also requires the creation of political, social and economic conditions that effectively protect human life from war, poverty, famine, explosions, collapse and displacement.

The challenge is therefore no longer limited to abolishing capital punishment. It also lies in abolishing the conditions that make death ordinary, repetitive and acceptable, as though it were a natural part of political life.

In the conflicts of the Horn of Africa, in the wars of the Middle East and Ukraine, and amid mass or increasingly frequent executions in Iran, the gap between the legal right to life and human reality continues to widen. This is where the crisis of the state itself is exposed.

What value does recognition of the human right to life have if politics is incapable of protecting people from every form of political, military, social and economic killing?

Death is no longer an exception in this geography. It is present in war, terrorism, famine, poverty, displacement and economic collapse, in societies exposed to every form of violation.

Defending life therefore becomes more than defending a legal right. It becomes a defense of the very possibility that human beings may live ordinary lives, without war, without fear, without hunger and without constantly awaiting death when they leave their country to escape it, only to find themselves facing the sea, borders, detention centers, prisons or barbed wire that follows them from one capital to another.

Migration itself thus becomes part of the democratic question. A person who leaves their country in search of life is supposed to enter a safer space, yet may instead find themselves trapped within a system of closed borders, detention, deportation and exploitation. Their right to life becomes suspended between two states: the one that drove them to leave and the one that refuses to receive them.

Death is no longer an exception. It is war, execution, terrorism, famine, poverty, collapse, fires and floods. Even those who flee death do not necessarily escape its geography.

They may move from war to the sea, from the sea to a border, from a border to a detention center, and from a detention center to another prison, as in cases involving radical Islamist prisoners transferred by air from Germany to Syrian prisons where they were tortured.

It is as though prisons themselves are no longer always fixed places. They have become moving trajectories in which geography changes while the human condition does not.

The issue, therefore, is no longer simply the abolition of the death penalty. It is the restoration of normal life itself: enabling human beings to live, to move, to cross borders, to dissent, to protest and to rise up without any of these acts becoming a potential path to death.