This study could not have been written fifty-five years ago because its subject matter did not exist. International norms addressing the limitation and the abolition of the death penalty are essentially a post-Second World War phenomenon. As a goal for civilized nations, abolition was promoted during the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, although it found expression only implicitly in the recognition of what international human rights law designated ‘the right to life’. At the time, all but a handful of States maintained the death penalty and, in the aftermath of a brutal struggle which had taken hundreds of millions of lives, few were even contemplating its abolition. When Uruguay objected to inclusion of the death penalty in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, it was accused of having Nazi sympathies. In 1946, a Norwegian court ruled that the death penalty was actually prescribed, by international law, and thus could be legitimately imposed despite the fact that it was inapplicable under the country's ordinary criminal law. The United Nations Command, during the Korean War, formally provided for imposition of the death penalty on prisoners of war for post-capture offences.

The idea of abolition gained momentum over the following decades. International lawmakers urged the limitation of the death penalty, by, for example, excluding juveniles, pregnant women and the elderly from its scope and by restricting it to an ever-shrinking list of serious crimes. Enhanced procedural safeguards were required where the death penalty still obtained.