Life Imprisonment and Human Rights by Dirk van Zyl Smit and Catherine Appleton, eds.

Excerpt

Life Imprisonment and Human Rights, edited by Dirk van Zyl Smit and Catherine Appleton, is a welcome addition to the literature on crime and punishment, focusing on the legitimacy of life imprisonment with or without parole from a human rights perspective. The major strength of this volume is that it provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of how life imprisonment has been imposed, restricted, or abolished worldwide. The work is composed of six main parts: 1) Life imprisonment in the US and six countries in Latin America; 2) Life imprisonment without parole in Australia, Uganda, India, Netherlands, Hungary, and France; 3) Life imprisonment and its incompatibility with the European Convention of Human Rights through the case study of England and Wales, Belgium, and Ireland; 4) Case study of countries which do not have life imprisonment in their criminal justice system: Portugal, Brazil, and 13 countries in Latin America); 5) Countries which have (re)introduced life imprisonment: the former Yugoslavia, Poland, and Spain; and 6) Discussion on the deterrent effect of life imprisonment in Germany, Switzerland and Nordic countries. The volume poses interesting, open-ended questions to readers including whether or not life imprisonment should be left as an issue of national sovereignty despite international human rights standards, and whether life imprisonment is more inhumane than the death penalty. …