Victor Hugo described the death penalty as ‘le signe spécial et éternel de la barbarie’. The archetypal form of State-authorized premeditated homicide, it is eternal in the sense that it has been with mankind since antiquity. Yet its abolition has been envisaged for at least two centuries, and with the accelerating progress of the movement for abolition, the end of this dark tunnel is now in sight. There are many ways to measure society's progress away from barbarism and towards a more humane condition. One is by the progressive development of legal norms.

The abolitionist movement's origins can be traced to the eighteenth century, and several States had eliminated the death penalty by the nineteenth century. However, the spread of abolitionist legislation is generally a post-Second World War phenomenon or, to put it another way, a development dating from the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on 10 December 1948. Of seventy-four countries described as abolitionist for all crimes as of December 1999, sixty-six have abolished the death penalty since 1948. Of the forty-nine States that are abolitionist for ordinary crimes or abolitionist de facto, all have conducted executions since 1948; in other words, such partial or de facto abolition is a relatively recent development.