The world, thankfully, has come a long way from the time when animals as well as humans were put to death for unacceptable behaviour. Regrettably, Australia, a self-proclaimed abolitionist, is only really serious about capital punishment when the lives of its citizens are at stake.
In 1662, in Connecticut, an otherwise respectable churchgoer named Potter was executed after watching the hanging of his four-legged “harem” – one cow, two heifers, three sheep and two sows. Not long after, in Germany, a man who had sodomised a mare was beheaded and the animal bludgeoned to death. A century later in France a she-ass, who had been enjoyed by a certain Jacques Ferron, was sentenced to death but reprieved after locals attested that she was “a most honest creature”.
These and other examples of “justice” were set out by the American historian Edward Payson Evans in Animal Trials, first published in 1906. Evans was not offended by the principle of capital punishment but mocked its use on animals, birds and other animate and inanimate objects. The latter included the church bell in the Russian town of Uglich, rung in 1591 to signal an insurrection. After the insurrection fizzled the bell was publicly whipped and banished to Siberia. It was not pardoned and restored to Uglich until 1892.
Evans commented that “capital punishment of a dumb animal for its crimes seems to us so irrational and absurd, that we can hardly believe that sane and sober men were ever guilty of such folly”. Which prompts the critical question: when will the execution of human beings by their fellows be universally seen for what it truly is – barbaric, ignorant and inhumane, serving no deterrent purpose and with a demonstrable record of grievous, irredeemable error?
Certainly, there has been progress towards abolition in recent decades. According to Amnesty International in 1977, when the last execution took place in Australia, only 12 countries worldwide had abolished the death penalty. That figure is now around 110, with another 20 or so countries no longer carrying out executions and taking steps to formally abolish it.
Amnesty’s most recent report on the death penalty, released in May 2024, noted a total of 1153 executions across 16 countries in 2023. This was the highest number since 2015, when 1634 executions were recorded, and a significant increase over the 883 executions recorded in 2022. China remains the world’s leading executioner, though the precise extent of its use it a state secret. Most other known executions were carried out in Iran (850+), Saudi Arabia, Somalia and the USA.
Long proclaiming its abolitionist credentials, Australia, for once, is on the right side of history. Yet Australian actions often appear to be self-interested and inconsistent, more concerned with the death penalty as a consular problem than a matter of principle.
The saga of the Bali Nine also illustrated the challenge, in an increasingly interconnected world, of sharing criminal intelligence with countries which still practise judicial murder. In its submission to a 2024 Federal Parliamentary Committee inquiry, the NSW Civil Liberties Council said the government should “never again assist a foreign government in cases where the death penalty is a possible outcome”. Evidence from the Attorney General’s Department and DFAT noted that some of Australia’s “important criminal cooperation partners maintained the death penalty”. These included the USA, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Malaysia, Singapore, China, the UAE, Lebanon and Jordan. Of these “partners”, only Malaysia supported a biennial UN General Assembly Resolution in December 2024 calling for a moratorium on the use of the death penalty. The other partners either opposed the resolution or abstained. (Curiously, PNG, which supported the resolution in 2022, the same year that PNG formally abolished capital punishment, voted against the resolution in 2024.)
The Attorney General’s Department and DFAT advised the parliamentary inquiry that in cases where there is a risk of capital punishment, intelligence cooperation is withheld until Australia receives “credible and reliable” diplomatic assurances that the death penalty “will not be imposed or, if imposed, will not be carried out”. The AFP, sharply criticised at the time of the Bali Nine’s arrest for tipping off Indonesia about the group’s intentions but not stopping its members leaving Australia, told the inquiry that any request involving the death penalty was now referred to a Sensitive Investigations Oversight Board (SIOB). Remarkably, the AFP later “clarified” that the decision to elevate death penalty matters to the SIOB was made only in May 2023, nearly eight years after the Bali Nine ringleaders, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, were shot by an Indonesian firing squad.
Then Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, described Chan and Sukumaran’s killing as “cruel and unnecessary”. The same comment should be made about all executions, with an additional word, “pointless”. Those who subscribe to the deterrent value of capital punishment might heed the words of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most prolific executioner. Pierrepoint wrote in his autobiography that “executions solve nothing”, serving only a primitive desire for revenge. “All the men and women whom I have faced at that final moment,” Pierrepoint added, “convince me that in what I have done I have not prevented a single murder.”
If it is wrong to execute Australians it is equally wrong to execute Chinese, Americans, Indonesians, Bangladeshis, Saudis, Japanese or anyone else. Selective outrage gives executioner states the opportunity to argue that the outrage is more about nationality than it is about principle. Amnesty International told the 2024 parliamentary inquiry that it was important to maintain a principled approach, no matter who was facing the death penalty. The organisation lamented that it was “as though it takes an Australian citizen to be at risk of the death penalty for the Australian government to be vocal, the Australian media to pay attention and the Australian public to then become educated”. Amnesty urged the government “to take a more outward and principled approach, no matter the nationality”.
The parliamentary inquiry’s subsequent report acknowledged it was not always possible for the government to reveal publicly what representations had been made about death row prisoners. But it cautioned that “private representations can make it appear as though little is being done and may appear to lack transparency”. The report recommended an annual statement to parliament by the government highlighting Australia’s advocacy in bilateral, multilateral and regional fora. That report should be accompanied by occasional public statements to demonstrate that the government is “continually making representations behind closed doors in death penalty related matters”.
One fairly recent case which should have prompted public comment by the Australian government, but appears to have drawn none, involved the execution in Alabama of Kenneth Smith, convicted of murder in 1988. After trying for several hours to execute Smith by lethal injection in November 2022, authorities finally killed him in January 2024 by nitrous hypoxia. That new and untested method was described by UN experts as “nothing short of State-sanctioned torture”.
Speaking in 2022 to support a moratorium on capital punishment, Foreign Minister Penny Wong declared that Australia opposed the death penalty “at all times for all people”. Too often though Australia’s voice is shrill when its nationals are involved, mostly mute at other times. Such a double standard does not help the cause of abolition.
Peter Rodgers is a former Australian Ambassador to Israel who has written two books on the Middle East, Herzl’s Nightmare: One land, Two peoples, and Arabian Plights: The future Middle East. He is a former journalist and winner of the Australian Journalist of the Year Award.
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