Life Imprisonment and Human Rights Driven Reformism ? Dirk van Zyl Smit Professor of Comparative and International Penal Law

Life Imprisonment worldwide

Too Many Life Sentences ? Country Number of Lifers Lifer Percentage of Total Prison Population United Kingdom 8638 lifers 10.4 England and Wales 12.2 Northern Ireland 16.2 Scotland Germany 1953 lifers 3.7 Russia 1760 lifers 0.3 France 466 lifers 0.8 Netherlands 32 lifers 0.6 Portugal (Data from for 1 September 2014: SPACE 2016)

Too Many Life Sentences? Country Number of Lifers Lifer Percentage of Total Prison Population United States of America 159520 7.20 India 71632 17.39 South Africa 13190 7.68 Kenya 3676 6.79

Long Minimum Periods before Release in England and Wales Minimum period increased from 12.5 years in 2003 to 21.1 years in 2013 as set by the courts. Actual average time spent prior to release in 2014 was 14.8 years. Consequently, number of lifers in prison may be predicted to increase.

Mandatory Life for (widely defined) Murder Long recognised as a BAD IDEA as life is not a proportionate punishment for every murder 1975 Butler Committee on Mentally Abnormal Offenders 1978 Advisory Council on the Penal System 1989 Select Committee of the House of Lords 1993 Lord Lane and the PRT Committee on the Penalty for Homicide 2010 Mitchell and Roberts Exploring the Mandatory Life Sentence for Murder 2011 Morris and Blom-Cooper Fine Lines, Murder Manslaughter and the Taking of Human Life

Inadequate Opportunities to Rehabilitate Bad planning Inadequate resources Priority for imprisonment for public protection

Human Rights to the Rescue? Dignity (absence of inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment) Proportionate Punishment Hope Hope is an important and constitutive aspect of the human person. Those who commit the most abhorrent and egregious of acts and who inflict untold suffering upon others, nevertheless retain their fundamental humanity and carry within themselves the capacity to change. Long and deserved though their prison sentences may be, they retain the right to hope that, someday, they may have atoned for the wrongs which they have committed. They ought not to be deprived entirely of such hope. To deny them the experience of hope would be to deny a fundamental aspect of their humanity and, to do that, would be degrading. (Judge Power-Forde in Vinter v UK 2013)

Social Rehabilitation A Human Rights Success Story? German Federal Constitutional Court (1977) James, Wells and Lee v UK (2012) Haney, Kaiyam and Massey v Secretary of State for Justice (2014)

Courts and Governmental Resistance United Kingdom Vinter v UK (2013) R v McLoughlin (2014) Hutchinson v UK (2015) (2016?) Netherlands Murray v The Netherlands (2016) United States of America (juveniles only) Graham v Florida (2010) (also Miller 2013) and Montgomery (2016) Hungary T.P. and A.T. v Hungary (2016

Human Rights and Due Process Weeks v UK (1987) Thynne, Wilson and Gunnell v UK (1991) Stafford v UK (2002) Osborn v Parole Board (2013)

The Problem of Due Process on its Own: the Limits of Human Rights Better procedures  But: More lifers = The importance of a comprehensive approach

Life Imprisonment Worldwide Project Thank you! Life Imprisonment Worldwide Project LIW@nottingham.ac.uk Dirk.Van-Zyl-Smit@nottingham.ac.uk