struggled to have their party vote out the death penalty, as abolition was one of the social reforms that labor and socialist parties in many countries had promised for decades.
The government was not receptive. However, in 1949 it created a Royal Commission on Capital Punishment and suspended all executions, but the Commission was expressly forbidden to consider whether the death penalty should be abolished. Nevertheless, these investigations, stretching over four years, set off the current wave of agitation against the death penalty in the Commonwealth countries and in the United States.
The Royal Commission favored abolition as the best solution to the complex legal and penal problems, even though their explicit recommendations were not realized. No sooner was their report published than the Canadian Parliament established its own inquiry into capital punishment, and several U.S. experts gave testimony at these hearings. Concurrently, debates at the United Nations often touched on the compatibility of the state's right to kill and the individual's r
...