Lebanon abolishes the death penalty, first Arab state to do so
Parliament replaced capital punishment with life imprisonment with hard forced labour; Hezbollah's bloc opposed the change.
Lebanon's Parliament has voted to abolish the death penalty, making the country the first in the Arab world to remove capital punishment from its legal code. Lawmakers agreed the maximum sentence will now be life imprisonment with hard forced labour.
What the vote changed
Of the 128 members of Parliament, a majority supported the bill, while the parliamentary bloc of Hezbollah voted against it. The measure replaces the death penalty in statute and sets life imprisonment with hard forced labour as the harshest available punishment.
Justice Minister Adel Nassar described the decision as "a historic step" for Lebanon and a significant change to the country's criminal law.
Although the death penalty remained on Lebanon's books, the state has not carried out executions since January 2004. Over the past two decades death sentences were occasionally pronounced but later suspended or commuted.
With the parliamentary vote, Lebanon has formally ended the long period of legal uncertainty and permanently removed the death penalty as the most severe sanction.
New tensions have also been reported in Lebanon: two Israeli soldiers and one Lebanese were killed.
Photo: Heretiq / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)
