The fight to abolish the death penalty remains "eminently contemporary", French President Emmanuel Macron said as campaigners, judges and former death row prisoners gathered in Paris this week for the World Congress Against the Death Penalty, amid rising executions worldwide and renewed support for capital punishment in some democracies.
Issued on: 02/07/2026 - RFI
A gurney used for lethal injections at the Texas death house in Huntsville, Texas. More than 110 countries have now abolished the death penalty, but executions continue to rise in a number of others. ASSOCIATED PRESS - Pat Sullivan
Speaking on Tuesday at the ninth World Congress Against the Death Penalty (ECPM) in Paris, Macron said abolition should not be treated as a settled achievement, 45 years after France scrapped capital punishment.
"Many people pretend to believe that it is a foregone conclusion," he said. "But the risks remain in many countries – and nothing can be taken for granted."
The congress, organised by the NGO Together Against the Death Penalty, is being held from 30 June to 2 July at several venues across Paris and is due to close on Thursday.
Macron said the debate was returning "amidst confusion over principles and language", particularly in the wake of crimes that shock public opinion.
In a post on X, he wrote: "The existential struggle for the abolition of the death penalty is never a foregone conclusion."
In France, calls for a tougher response have followed several recent child murder cases, including that of Lyhanna, aged 11, whose death exposed alleged failings in the handling of earlier rape complaints against the suspect, and Louis, aged 17, killed in an alleged lynching in Narbonne.
A CSA poll for right-wing media outlets CNews, Europe 1 and the Journal du Dimanche, published on 14 June, found that 68 percent of French people supported holding a referendum on reinstating the death penalty for crimes against children.
"The death penalty has never made a society safer. Never," Macron told the congress. "Because it does not act as a deterrent. That is simply not true. This has been demonstrated, observed and measured."
He said capital punishment had "never had the deterrent effect" claimed by its supporters, including "often authoritarian" governments that present it as a tool of order.
France's President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, France, on 30 June 2026. AFP - CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON
Abolition under pressure
Speaking at the congress on Wednesday, European Court of Human Rights President Mattias Guyomar also warned that support for restoring the death penalty was re-emerging in Europe, despite the continent having abolished it.
He said the court's case law had established that capital punishment was fundamentally incompatible with human dignity.
France abolished the death penalty in 1981, shortly after François Mitterrand became president. The last person sentenced to death in France, Philippe Maurice, was pardoned by Mitterrand that same year and is among the campaigners attending the Paris congress.
Macron has framed abolition as a democratic principle rather than a purely legal one, saying it rests on the idea that even those who commit serious crimes retain their humanity.
"Whatever any one of us may have done, we do not have the power to deny them this shared humanity," he said, calling that principle a "cornerstone of all our democratic societies".
According to Isabelle Lonvis-Rome, France's ambassador for human rights, 114 states have now definitively abolished capital punishment. But 47 countries still retain it, including the United States.
Lonvis-Rome said the long-term global trend remained abolitionist, even as several countries were seeing a "resurgence of executions" used as tools of "political repression, social control or in response to security crises".
Executions rising
ECPM says China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq carried out the highest number of executions in 2024.
Iran has drawn particular concern. According to Norway-based Iran Human Rights and ECPM, Iranian authorities executed at least 1,639 people in 2025 – the highest figure recorded since 1989.
The congress also heard from former death row prisoners, including Daniel Gwynn, an American who spent nearly 30 years under sentence of death before being exonerated in 2024.
"I was targeted because of the colour of my skin. I was young, I was 24, I didn't know the law. And this system crushed me," Gwynn told RFI. "I was sentenced to death and held in solitary confinement for 28 years."
Gwynn said he had received no compensation or apology after his release.
"Not even a bus ticket to get home," he said. "Because the authorities don't want to admit they were wrong, or even that they did it on purpose. To this day, I don't even know how I became a suspect in this case."
Asked what he would say to supporters of capital punishment, Gwynn said the argument that it prevents crime does not stand up.
"The death penalty doesn't work. It has no deterrent effect on crime," he said. "There are always people who commit murders. So it is not a deterrent. And there is a more humane way to punish someone for a crime they have committed."
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