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

2. Life Imprisonment worldwide

3. 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)

4. 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

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

6. 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

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

8. 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)

9. 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)

10. 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

11. 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)

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

13. Life Imprisonment Worldwide Project
Thank you!
Life Imprisonment Worldwide Project