Lebanon’s parliament voted Tuesday to abolish the death penalty, making it the first Middle Eastern nation to formally end capital punishment. The speaker’s office confirmed the draft law’s approval.
The vote, opened by veteran parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri, enshrines into law a de facto moratorium on executions that has been in place since January 2004.
A majority of Lebanon’s 128-member parliament voted in favor of the measure, with the notable exception of the parliamentary bloc of Hezbollah, which did not immediately comment on the vote.
Rather than simply striking the punishment from the books, lawmakers voted to replace the death sentence with life imprisonment and aggravated hard labor. Any existing death sentences will be commuted to life imprisonment once the bill clears its remaining legislative hurdles.
According to Human Rights Watch’s earlier analysis of the draft legislation, the law abolishes the death penalty wherever it is mentioned in Lebanese law, amending Article 37 of the Penal Code and annulling Article 43 along with Articles 420 to 424 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which had set out procedures for carrying out executions.
The path to Tuesday’s vote was not straightforward. The bill had previously stalled in July after the Lebanese Forces bloc walked out of parliament amid a dispute over a linked amnesty law. It ultimately returned as the first item on the agenda of a lengthy two-day General Assembly session called by Speaker Berri.
Justice Minister Adel Nassar, present in parliament for the vote, called the move a “historic step” for the country. One of the bill’s supporters, MP Simon Abi Ramia, put it more starkly: “We have not only abolished a punishment but we have also abolished the idea that the state can be a murderer in the name of the law,” he told fellow lawmakers, adding that abolition was not a sign of tolerance for crime but a way of protecting the Republic from becoming an instrument of killing.
Rights groups welcomed the decision. Ramzi Kaiss, Lebanon researcher at Human Rights Watch, described it as marking a definitive break from a punishment that should never be used.
Human Rights Watch had estimated, based on figures from the Lebanese Association for Civil Rights, the group that drafted the legislation, that roughly 84 prisoners were facing death sentences in Lebanon at the time the bill was under consideration.
The vote came as parliament also took up debate on a controversial general amnesty law, the broadest since the end of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war in 1990, which could reduce sentences or free convicted militants and drug offenders, with some exceptions.
The measure has proven far more divisive: families of Lebanese soldiers and security personnel killed by Islamist militant groups have repeatedly protested it, arguing they had hoped to see their relatives’ killers executed rather than granted reduced sentences.
Lebanon’s unofficial moratorium dates back more than two decades, though it was not always observed. Three men were hanged in January 2004 despite objections from human rights groups and the European Union, which argued the executions breached commitments Lebanon had made under its EU partnership agreement.
Since that moratorium took hold, dozens of death sentences have been issued but later suspended or commuted rather than carried out.
Notably, Lebanon’s religious institutions, some of whose court systems still consider the death penalty legal, did not issue statements on the vote either, underscoring the complex overlap between civil and religious jurisdiction that characterizes much of Lebanese law.
With Tuesday’s vote, Lebanon joins a small number of nations worldwide that have formally abolished capital punishment in recent years, but stands alone in the Arab world and the broader Middle East in doing so, a distinction likely to be cited by rights advocates pushing for similar reforms elsewhere in the region.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Lebanon’s parliament abolished the death penalty on Tuesday, becoming the first country in the Middle East to formally end capital punishment, replacing it with life imprisonment and aggravated hard labor.
The move turns a de facto moratorium in place since 2004 into binding law, with existing death sentences to be commuted once the bill completes its remaining legislative steps.
This is a historic, symbolic break from state-sanctioned killing, hailed by rights groups as a milestone for the region, even as Lebanon’s parliament simultaneously wrestles with a separate, far more contentious amnesty law.
