“Our republic does not kill”

Lebanon sits amid one of the world’s deadliest hotspots. War, armed political violence, civil conflict, and terrorism stalk the land. They have done so for decades.

And yet, in the midst of this brutality and the ongoing wars throughout the region, Lebanon has chosen to ban the death penalty.

It’s an astonishingly bold move that positions Lebanon as the only Arab state in the Middle East to have done so. Just this past March, Lebanon’s immediate neighbor to the south, Israel, moved in the opposite direction and voted to expand its death penalty, specifically for terrorism.

The abolition bill that the Lebanese Parliament passed on August 11, 2026, was deliberately crafted to allow for no exceptions. No exception for acts of terrorism, nor military offenses, nor treason, nor espionage. It made Lebanon the 114th country to abolish the death penalty for all crimes.

Lebanon did not abolish the death penalty because violence had receded. It abolished it while violence was one of the defining facts of Lebanese life, which prompts the question: Why? Why would a country under these circumstances remove a punishment that governments so often turn to under precisely these circumstances?

The answer is that Lebanon has tried the other way and discovered that it did not work.

The civil war that had torn the country from 1975 until 1990 left a society with a heightened dread of criminal and political violence.

On Sunday, February 27, 1994, the Maronite Catholic church of Saydet al-Najat in Zouk Mikael, a coastal town just north of Beirut, was bombed. The bombing killed 11 people and injured more than 54 others, including children.

Less than a month after the bombing, the Lebanese Parliament passed Law No. 302/94. The law’s title translates as “Applying the Death Penalty for Intentional Homicide or Homicide with a Political Motive or Character.” More informally, it became known as “The Killer Law".

Law No. 302/94 was particularly harsh because it not only expanded the use of the death penalty, but it also stripped judges of their discretion to consider mitigating circumstances. It streamlined the path to the gallows or firing squad.

Prior to the law’s passage in 1994, Lebanon had barely used the death penalty. Only one judicial execution took place between 1972 and 1994; in the four years following the law’s introduction, 14 people were executed in quick succession.

The fast pace of executions actually helped to galvanize public opposition, further fueled when there were problems with the gallows in the public hanging of Hasan Nada Abu-Jabal and Wisam Nayif Issa in May of 1998

In response to Law No. 302/94 and the wave of executions that it spawned, the pioneering human rights advocates Dr. Ougarit Younan and Dr. Walid Slaibi worked to unite civil society opposition, in 1997 launching the National Campaign Against the Death Penalty in Lebanon.

By 2001, the movement had brought together 58 civil organizations, along with judges, lawyers, journalists, activists and religious figures. In that year, this unified bloc lobbied successfully for the repeal of Law No. 302/94, restoring judges’ discretion to consider mitigating circumstances.

After three executions in 2004, Lebanon stopped executing altogether.

”Two crimes don’t make justice.” - Walid Slaibi

In October 2025, a bill was introduced to the Lebanese Parliament, drafted by Ougarit Younan and signed by seven MPs from strikingly different political groupings. It was named the Walid Slaibi Law, after one of the founders of Lebanon’s abolition movement—and Younan’s husband—who died in 2023.

Before the Lebanese Parliament votes on a bill, the text must be accompanied by an asbāb mujiba—essentially an explanatory memorandum or statement of motives—to justify why the law is needed and what problems it aims to solve.

The bill’s asbāb mujiba argued for abolition on multiple grounds:

• the need to “humanize punishments” as part of Lebanon’s civilizational and human-rights development;

• Lebanon’s repeated votes, in 2020, 2022 and 2024, in favor of the UN General Assembly moratorium on executions;

• the fact that Lebanon had gone 21 years without an execution, from 2004 to 2025, showing that successive governments had already chosen not to use the punishment despite difficult national circumstances;

• the 2001 repeal of Law 302/94, the law that had sharply expanded mandatory death sentences in the 1990s, as an earlier stage in Lebanon’s movement away from capital punishment;

• Lebanon’s obligations and commitments under international human-rights instruments protecting the right to life;

• and the argument that crime prevention should address the causes of crime rather than rely on execution as deterrence.

Importantly, the memorandum also specifically invoked Lebanon’s experience in the 1990s, noting that 14 people were executed during 1994–1998, when harsher punishment was being pursued after the war, yet crime continued and capital punishment proved neither a deterrent nor a solution.

The bill’s proponents looked back at Lebanon’s punitive turn in the 1990s and used its failure as part of their case for abolition. Lebanon had already tried responding to insecurity and crime by increasing its use of execution. The experience did not produce deterrence. Twenty-one subsequent years without executions demonstrated that the country could function without them.

“The decision to proceed along the path of abolishing the death penalty comes not despite the exceptional circumstances Lebanon is going through, but because of them.” - Justice Minister Adel Nassar (translated from the Arabic)

Lebanon didn't leap from enthusiastic execution to abolition. For twenty-two years it continued to encounter murder, terrorism, assassinations, war, treason, and political violence without executing anyone. That twenty-two-year de facto moratorium became evidence that Lebanon could punish serious crime and survive extraordinary political violence without executions.

But a moratorium meant that executions remained in the state’s “crime-fighting” arsenal. A moratorium survives only until the next sufficiently horrifying crime produces sufficient political pressure.

Abolition, however, does something a moratorium cannot. It removes the weapon from the cupboard.

In February 2026, while the bill was moving through parliament, Younan said its premise was that society should not answer violence with violence, nor crime with crime.

“The strength of the state is not measured by its capacity to kill, but by its capacity to establish justice and safeguard human dignity.” Justice Minister Adel Nassar (translation)

Finally, after an unusually substantive legislative process, parliament passed the bill on August 11. President Joseph Aoun subsequently promulgated it as Law No. 68.

Speaking to Le Monde immediately after the vote, one of the bill’s sponsors, Halimé El Kaakour, said:

“Abolishing it means we are no longer at risk of someone calling for its enforcement at one moment or another.”

What we should recognize is that despite its limitations, a moratorium has the power to transform the social and political landscape by showing that the absence of executions does not make a society less safe nor inhibit the state’s power to enforce sanctions for criminal acts.

Although Lebanon’s daring abandonment of capital punishment makes it a lonely outlier in the Middle East, this wasn’t a society suddenly reaching a moral consensus while bombs fell around it.

Political deal-making, international pressure from the EU and the UN, practical considerations, sectarian interests, and principled abolitionism all mixed together to propel the legislation.

Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc did not support the bill and its MPs walked out en masse before the vote.

An amnesty bill that was expected to benefit thousands of detainees and that was scheduled to be voted on the following day garnered the abolition bill additional votes, because some politicians believed that commuting death sentences would make prisoners from their own sectarian communities potentially eligible for the amnesty.

It’s interesting to note that unlike the abolition law, which was explicitly “for all crimes”, the amnesty bill contained carve-outs for grave offenses, including terror financing, premeditated murder, and collaboration with Israel. That makes the Walid Slaibi Law an even more forceful statement for abolition.

Lebanon once answered an atrocity by making death mandatory. Thirty-two years later, surrounded by violence again, it has decided that the next atrocity will not be allowed to make that decision for it.

“Our republic does not kill.” - Justice Minister Adel Nassar

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