INTRODUCTION

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Prime Minister of Spain, stated in the United Nations' Palace of Nations in Geneva on February 24, 2010, that the Spanish government will take a leading role in promoting the worldwide abolition of the death penalty. It would promote initiatives within the European Union and the United Nations, and also create an International Academic Network Against the Death Penalty. Prime Minister Zapatero's visionary position can be placed within the marked proliferation, most clearly demonstrated since the late 1980s, of sovereign governments accepting the arguments that the death penalty is an ineffective penal policy, and that it is also a violation of human rights. This statement in the United Nations can be seen as a further political approval, and a strategic continuation, of the first adopted United Nations General Assembly resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty in December 2007, and in 2008 the General Assembly affirmed “the decisions taken by an increasing number of States to apply a moratorium on executions and the global trend towards the abolition of the death penalty.” As of March 2010, 139 countries have abolished the death penalty, and since 2000, there have been 23 countries that have abolished this punishment in all circumstances. A minority of 58 countries have the death penalty on their statute books, but in 2008, only 25 countries were known to Amnesty International to have administered an execution, and it is notable that “[n]inety three percent of all known executions took place in five countries: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the USA.”