Hands Off Cain
Israel

The country has been abolitionist for ordinary crimes since 1954.

The country has been abolitionist for ordinary crimes since 1954.

1 MIN READ
The country has been abolitionist for ordinary crimes since 1954.
Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the death penalty has been imposed and executed on only one occasion. In 1962, Adolph Eichmann was put to death under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law, 1950.
It is the prevailing view that all five of the remaining offences for which the death penalty remains carry a discretionary capital sentence. Capital offences are: genocide; murder of persecuted persons committed during the Nazi regime; acts of treason under the military law and under the penal law committed in time of hostilities and the illegal use and carrying of arms.
Extradition to Israel only involves the death penalty in exceptional cases. One such case involved Ivan Demjanjuk. Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk was identified as ‘Ivan the Terrible’, a Nazi guard at the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland by Jewish survivors. He was extradited from the United States and sentenced to death by a special tribunal in Jerusalem under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law in 1988. The Supreme Court acquitted him in 1993 after evidence suggested that another Ukrainian was Ivan the Terrible. Demjanjuk was the second person, after Eichmann, to face a war crimes trial in Israel.
Israel voted for the death penalty approved by the UN Commission on Human Rights on April 20, 2005.