Capital punishment: A human right examination case study and jurisprudence

st century the death penalty should still be an adhered to practice or not it will trace the development of capital punishment as a human rights issue in the international forum and examine recent challenges to the death penalty. The structure that this paper adopts is discussed in short herein, any paper on death penalty in the current times would be incomplete without mentioning the Saddam Hussein execution, hence the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein is examined only from the perspective of the validity or not of the sentence of death penalty awarded to Saddam in the first section. In the next section, the researcher traces the abolitionist movement in the world and presents statistically the current stand of the world on the issue of capital punishment. The next section presents the jurisprudential analysis of the death penalty and therefore examines the various theories propounded on this subject starting from the theories of punishment to the arguments for and against capital punishment. The researcher finally goes on to establish that the death penalty intersects with international law and is challenged by it and therefore defining the death penalty as a Human Rights issue is imperative. For the purpose of proving the above proposition, apart from employing relevant primary sources in the form of treaty provisions, secondary sources in the form of treatises and articles, are also used and these are enumerated in detail in the index of authorities.