CNPS, Milan May 8, 2025

Luis Arroyo Zapatero. President of Société Internationale de Défense Social

Words and things, a duet so taste of Michel Foucault, are daughters of his time. Men and their ideas too. This is the case with Robert Badinter. I remember his words well in the presentation of the academic project of the European Procurator in Luxembourg when when referring to the first European institutions he said that they were created when "the ashes of the crematoriums were still warm." I have repeated the appointment, because the International Social Society It was created at that same time.

But then I didn't know Badinter's personal and family history. Especially that of his father, whose image he managed to glimpse in the place of confinement along with other French Jews in Lyon, in the headquarters of the Klaus Barbi deed, possibly on the way to sobibor, one of the places like those ”Cimetiers under the Moon"Georges Bernanos denounced regarding Franco's Spain. He was also witnessing the most radical of the most serious penalties, in the summer of liberation he attended the execution of several collaborations condemned by a martial court. In the same way he learned rudely that the not return of his father and so many others was for his murder in the Nazis extermination fields (Complete Read here)

Luis Arroyo Zapatero and Antonio Muñoz Aunión

Honorary Rector of the University of Castilla La Mancha and president of the International Society for Social Defense / Professor of International Law at the University of Jaen and director of the International Death Penalty Network

The first surprise that Pope Francis gave us was that he addressed not only Catholics or Christians, but all people of good will. And the first surprise for the jurists was that on his first Holy Thursday in 2013, instead of going to wash the spotless feet of twelve cardinals in the Vatican, he went to the youth prison of Regina Coeli and he washed the feet of precisely twelve young people, two of them women and, to top it all off, one of them Muslim. It was all said like that. He did it again this last Holy Thursday. Just in case, a few days later he published an “Apostolic Exhortation”, with a severe criticism of what has been called neoliberalism and that had led to the 2008 crisis, condemning millions of people to misery and denouncing the treatment of them as “discarded”. Shortly afterwards he published the first encyclical, Laudato yes, with which he put an end to the frivolous or denialist treatment of climate change.

When I learned about the entire life of the new Pope, I realized that the hasty visit to the island of Lesbos had a lot to do with the status of his parents as Italian emigrants and with the tragedy that usually accompanies migrations, as happened to those who embarked on the ship for which they had paid for the tickets that was going to take them to the Americas and which was shipwrecked and quite a few died, and on which they did not manage to board because they had not yet been able to sell all their belongings.

Pope Francis had already spoken out against the death penalty without exceptions before penalists from around the world and their international scientific organizations in Rome in 2014. In the same process he formulated the full disqualification of life imprisonment as a hidden death penalty. But although the catechism drafted in the 1992 edition by John Paul II had broadly disqualified the death penalty, it maintained it as an exception in section 2267 for "cases in which this was the only way to effectively defend human lives from the unjust aggressor", a clause that allowed its abusive use in many countries, as occurs in systems that claim to be exceptional. Extremist Catholics relied on that exception to defend or excuse it.

On March 20, 2015, a private audience of the Pope took place with Federico Mayor Zaragoza, president of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, which had been created in 2010 at the request of President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. He was accompanied by Asunta Vivó, general secretary of the Commission, Roberto Carles, general secretary of the Latin American Association of Penal Lawyers and Criminologists and the undersigned. It is severely impressive to be alone with the Pope around the table in that office that we have seen so many times when he receives the heads of state. Seeing the Pope dressed like that and speaking in Spanish produced an almost physical sensation. Neither he nor Federico Mayor stopped talking about everything, except the death penalty, because when Francisco sat down he moved a text to Mayor on the table and told him “I'll take care of this matter.” So Mayor went on to warn about the men of peace who had been assassinated from Kennedy to Isaac Rabin. Francisco said of him in Argentine that he was “a great one.” The Pope told what he intended to say in the American Congress and in the UN during his immediate trip, which Mayor took advantage of to warn him about the Republicans, although as a reader of his first apostolic exhortation he knew that it was well illustrated. We did not know it until later, but the Pope had just been informed that the next morning at an open-air mass in Naples a possible attack by the Mafia had been detected, which does not forgive the Pope for excommunicating them. The same thing happens to them as many Catholic conservatives, who do not like the Pope telling them what is wrong.

Pocos meses más tarde fuimos al Vaticano a presentar al Papa el libro que las sociedades científicas habíamos editado acompañando su texto “Por una justicia realmente humana “. Cuando tras entregarle José Luis de la Cuesta el libro me fui yo a presentar, no me dio ocasión a terminar. “Usted es el de la pena de muerte” me espetó, y de seguido ordenó “y dígale a Mayor y a nuestra amiga de Sevilla -Asunción Milá de Salinas, fundadora de la Asociación española contra la pena de muerte en 1977- que he puesto al cardenal Schönborn de Viena a estudiar el asunto y le he dicho que se dé prisa”. Así fue, afortunadamente, y el 1 de agosto de 2018 lo anunció el Cardenal jesuita español Luis Ladaria, presidente de lo que fue primero Inquisición, luego Santo Oficio y que desde 1965 se llama Congregación para la Doctrina de la Fe. No es solo un cambio de nombre, es la renuncia al fuego purificador.

La carta, expresamente aprobada por el Papa, manifiesta que, si en el pasado la pena de muerte pudo parecer un instrumento aceptable para la tutela del bien común, hoy es cada vez más viva la conciencia de que la dignidad de la persona no se pierde ni siquiera después de haber cometido crímenes muy graves. Dice también que se ha extendido una nueva comprensión acerca del sentido de las sanciones penales, que deben estar orientadas ante todo a la rehabilitación y reinserción social de los criminales y, en fin, que se han implementado sistemas de detención eficaces que garantizan la necesaria defensa de los ciudadanos, todo lo cual ha dado lugar a una nueva conciencia que reconoce la inadmisibilidad de la pena de muerte. La carta asume argumentos anteriores del propio Pontífice, especialmente el de que la pena de muerte implica un trato cruel, inhumano y degradante, que se aplica con amplia discriminación social y racial y que resulta irreparable ante los errores judiciales. Para fundamentar todo se remite a la carta entregada al presidente de la Comisión Internacional Federico Mayor Zaragoza. En efecto, el Papa, como nos dijo en la mentada reunión, se había hecho cargo del asunto y cumplido con lo que estaba en la esfera de su competencia, a la vez que mantenía su compromiso con el movimiento abolicionista internacional. El Papa ha reafirmado el sentido de la reforma del catecismo en su alocución a los miembros de la Comisión internacional contra la pena de muerte con motivo de su visita el 17 de diciembre de 2018. Reconoce allí el Papa que, en el tiempo anterior, el de las primeras reformas del artículo pertinente del catecismo, “no se había alcanzado el grado actual del desarrollo de los derechos humanos y el recurso a la pena de muerte se presentaba como una consecuencia lógica y justa. Incluso en el Estado Pontificio se había recurrido a esta forma inhumana de castigo, ignorando la primacía de la misericordia sobre la justicia”. Con el catecismo renovado la doctrina oficial es que “la pena de muerte es siempre inadmisible, porque atenta contra la inviolabilidad y la dignidad de la persona “.

Para los tiempos de la Iglesia el proceso ha sido muy rápido. Fundamentar la abolición en la idea de la dignidad de los seres humanos fue una gran contribución al 70 aniversario de la Declaración universal de los derechos humanos. Francisco ha sido muy coherente con su programa de reformas y de renovadas ideas desde su primerísima exhortación apostólica de 2013 y su crítica visión del orden económico internacional, con su Encíclica sobre el cuidado del medio ambiente, Laudato Si, con su campaña contra el hambre o sus acciones diplomáticas clave en lugares de guerra como Ucrania, Irán, Siria y en los últimos años de nuevo sobre Ucrania y sobre Gaza, o en visitas arriesgadas como a la República centroafricana o a Chile, aunque aquí por muy diversas razones.

El Papa era sobre todo una persona normal, que había conocido los estudios ordinarios, las amistades y el trato de chicos y chicas y de adulto había vivido la tragedia Argentina en la que a la violencia que incorporaba a sectores de la Teología de la Liberación le respondieron unos militares genocidas que, eso sí, eran de misa diaria y tras recibir la comunión de manos del nuncio y del primado ordenaban fríamente arrojar a los presos desde aviones militares en alta mar, tras incontables torturas. Hizo lo que pudo siendo por entonces superior de los Jesuitas y “lo que pudo” siempre es mucho en una dictadura y tiene gran mérito. Entre una teología violenta y una teología genocida a él le encomendaron llevar a cabo la “teología del bien común” y a ello se ha dedicado también todos estos años de papado. Hasta el último día. Merece la pena leer el texto de su bendición City and the World del domingo en la página del Vaticano y completarla con la que fue su primer domingo de resurrección en el año 2013. Se ve a las claras que era un benéfico reformista, un amigo de los seres humanos de buena voluntad, un incondicional de los necesitados y de los discriminados. En este tiempo tempestuoso hemos perdido una buena brújula para perseguir el bien común.

Pero también el último día nos ha incitado a creer en la esperanza, un principio que es también el título de su último libro, La esperanza no defrauda nunca, y que me lleva a recordar su primer año Santo, el de la Misericordia, que es la palabra clásica para lo que hoy llamamos Solidaridad.

Luis Arroyo Zapatero and Antonio Muñoz Aunión

Honorary Rector of the University of Castilla La Mancha, President of the International Social Social Society. Prof. of International Law in University Jaen. Founders of the International Academic Network against the Death Penalty. 27 April 2025

The first surprise Pope Francis gave us was that he did not only address Catholics or only Christians, but all people of good will. And the first surprise for jurists was that on his first Holy Thursday in 2013 instead of going to wash the spotless feet of twelve cardinals in the Vatican he went to the Regina Coeli juvenile prison and washed the feet of precisely twelve young people, two of them women and, to top it off, one of them Muslim. It was all said and done. He did it again this last Holy Thursday. Just in case, a few days later, he published an “Apostolic Exhortation”, with a severe criticism of what has been called neoliberalism and which had led to the 2008 crisis, condemning millions of people to misery and denouncing the treatment of them as “discarded”. Soon after, he published his first encyclical, Laudate yes, which put an end to the frivolous or denialist treatment of climate change.

When I learned about the new Pope’s entire life, I realized that his hasty visit to the island of Lesbos had a lot to do with his parents’ status as Italian emigrants and with the tragedy that often accompanies migrations, as happened to those who boarded the ship for which they had paid the tickets that was to take them to the Americas and which sank and not a few died, and on which they did not board because they had not yet been able to sell all their belongings.

Pope Francis had already spoken out against the death penalty without exceptions before criminal lawyers from all over the world and their international scientific organizations in Rome in 2014. In the same proceedings he formulated the full disqualification of life imprisonment as a death penalty in disguise. But although the catechism written in the 1992 edition by John Paul II had largely disqualified the death penalty, it maintained it as an exception in paragraph 2267 for “cases in which it is the only way to effectively defend human lives from the unjust aggressor”, a clause that allowed its abusive use in many countries, as happens to the systems that claim to be exceptional, in that exception the extremist Catholics relied on to defend or excuse it.

On March 20, 2015, the Pope held a private audience with Federico Mayor Zaragoza, president of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, which had been created in 2010 at the request of President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. He was accompanied by Asunta Vivó, secretary general of the Commission, Roberto Carles, secretary general of the Latin American Association of Criminal Lawyers and Criminologists, and the undersigned. It is very impressive to be alone with the Pope around the table in that office that we have seen so many times when he receives heads of state. Seeing the Pope dressed as such and speaking in Spanish produces an almost physical sensation. Neither he nor Federico Mayor stopped talking about everything, except the death penalty, because when Francis sat down he moved a text on the table towards Mayor and told him “I will deal with this matter”. So Mayor went on to warn about the men of peace who had been assassinated, from Kennedy to Isaac Rabin. Of the latter, Francis said that he was “a great man”. He told the Pope what he intended to say in the American Congress and at the UN on his immediate trip, which Mayor took advantage of to warn him about the Republicans, although as a reader of his first apostolic exhortation he knew he was well enlightened. We did not know it until later, but the Pope had just been informed that the following morning at an open-air Mass in Naples a possible Mafia attack had been detected, which does not forgive the Pope for excommunicating them. The same thing happens to them as it does to not a few Catholic conservatives, who do not like the Pope telling them what is wrong.

A few months later we went to the Vatican to present to the Pope the book that the scientific societies had published to accompany his text “For a truly humane justice”. When, after José Luis de la Cuesta gave him the book, I went to present it to him, he did not give me a chance to finish. “You are the one against of the death penalty,” he said, and then ordered, “and tell Mayor and our friend from Seville (Asunción Milá, in this time 95 and today happy 105) that I have asked Cardinal Schönborn from Vienna to study the matter and I have told him to hurry up. So it was, fortunately, and on August 1, 2018 it was announced by the Spanish Jesuit Cardinal Luis Ladaria, president of what was first Inquisition, then Holy Office and since 1965 has been called the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. It is not just a change of name, it is the renunciation of the purifying fire.

The letter, expressly approved by the Pope, states that, while in the past the death penalty may have seemed an acceptable instrument for the protection of the common good, today there is a growing awareness that the dignity of the person is not lost even after the commission of very serious crimes. It also says that a new understanding of the meaning of penal sanctions has spread, that they must be oriented above all to the rehabilitation and social reintegration of criminals and, finally, that effective systems of detention have been implemented that guarantee the necessary defense of citizens, all of which has given rise to a new awareness that recognizes the inadmissibility of the death penalty. The letter takes up previous arguments of the Pontiff himself, especially that the death penalty implies cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, that it is applied with broad social and racial discrimination and that it is irreparable in the face of judicial errors. To substantiate all this, he refers to the letter delivered to the President of the International Commission Federico Mayor Zaragoza. In effect, the Pope, as he told us in the aforementioned meeting, has taken charge of the matter and has complied with what is in the sphere of his competence, while maintaining his commitment to the international abolitionist movement. The Pope has reaffirmed the sense of the reform of the catechism in his address to the members of the International Commission against the Death Penalty on the occasion of his visit on December 17, 2018. There the Pope recognizes that, in the previous time, that of the first reforms of the relevant article of the catechism, “the current level of development of human rights had not been reached and recourse to the death penalty was presented as a logical and just consequence. Even in the Papal States this inhuman form of punishment had been resorted to, ignoring the primacy of mercy over justice”. With the renewed catechism the official doctrine is that “the death penalty is always inadmissible, because it violates the inviolability and dignity of the person”.

For Church times the process has been very rapid. Grounding abolition in the idea of the dignity of human beings was a great contribution to the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Francis has been very consistent with his program of reforms and renewed ideas since his very first apostolic exhortation of 2013 and his critical view of the international economic order, with his Encyclical on care for the environment, Laudato Si, with his campaign against hunger or his key diplomatic actions in places of war like Ukraine, Iran, Syria and in recent years again on Ukraine and on Gaza, or in risky visits like to the Central African Republic or to Chile, although here for very different reasons.

The Pope was above all a normal person, who had known ordinary studies, friendships and dealing with boys and girls and as an adult had lived through the Argentine tragedy in which the violence that incorporated sectors of Liberation Theology was answered by genocidal military who, yes, were daily mass and after receiving communion from the hands of the nuncio and the primate coldly ordered to throw the prisoners from military planes on the high seas, after countless tortures. He did what he could, being at that time superior of the Jesuits, and “what he could” is always a lot in a dictatorship and has great merit. Between a violent theology and a genocidal theology, he was entrusted to carry out the theology of the common good and he has dedicated all these years of papacy to it. Until his last day. It is worth reading the text of his Sunday City and the World blessing on the Vatican website and complete it with what was his first resurrection Sunday in 2013. It is clear that he was a beneficent reformer, a friend of human beings of good will, a stalwart of the needy and the discriminated. In this stormy time we have lost a good compass to pursue the common good.

But also on the last day he urged us to believe in hope, a principle that is also the title of his latest book, Hope Never Defrauds, and which leads me to recall his first Holy Year, the Year of Mercy, which is the classic word for what we call Solidarity today.

(Photo in Santa Martha Closter with Jose Luis de la Cuesta presenting the joint book “Passion of Cruelty”, 2016).

By Luis Arroyo Zapatero and Antonio Muñoz Aunión. Founders of the International Academic Network against the Death Penalty.

Hidden in the endless catalog of executive orders is one that also confronts all of Latin America and Europe and the principle of humanity: one month after taking office as president, Donald Trump has ordered the Department of Justice, through the Attorney General's Office, to resume the federal capital punishment and lift the moratorium on executions by Executive Order no. 14164 on Restoration of the Death Penalty and Public Security Protection.

Among the arguments that justify their decision is, on the one hand, that "the American people, through their legitimate representatives, have reaffirmed the effectiveness of capital punishment for its deterrent effects, as a vehicle for victims to obtain justice and emotional satisfaction. In this way, the history of the Department of Justice that has promoted federal death penalty sentences for the most horrendous crimes under the rule of law is resumed and it closes to a period in which the popular will had been supplanted by personal beliefs, during which, violators of minors, mass murderers, terrorists and other dangerous criminals stopped being charged with the death penalty, which seriously undermined and damaged public opinion in the criminal justice system, for the victims of these crimes, an inaction that betrayed the sacred duty of doing Justice.”

In order to comply with the Presidential Order, the Attorney General has ordered “to lift the moratorium of the previous Administration in force since July 1, 2021 immediately, so that when a capital punishment is imposed by a federal court, the Department will proceed to execute it in accordance with the Law. Secondly, “federal prosecutors will request the capital punishment for crimes that Congress has classified as capital and where there are no extenuating circumstances,” while expanding the catalog of crimes for that the death penalty must be urged, which even applies to foreigners who cross national borders and are in the United States without legal status.

Likewise, the Capital Punishment Review Committee of the Office of the Attorney General is obliged to review its decisions not to request the death penalty for those cases in which it can be requested during the period from January 20, 2021 to January 19, 2025, a review that will take place within a maximum period of 120 days, paying special attention to those linked to cartels or transnational criminal organizations, capital crimes committed by irregular immigrants, and in territories Indians, or within federal maritime and territorial jurisdiction.

Finally, the Presidential Instruction obliges the Department of Justice to modify any previous order regarding the application of the so-called "Justice Manual" on the reviews previously ordered by the Administration. Likewise, and within a period of 90 days, this Office will assess whether the use of a single component in lethal injection, pentobarbital, complies with the requirements of the Eighth Amendment, and as part of this examination it will evaluate whether it is necessary to include other forms of execution in accordance with the Federal Penal and Procedural Code and will evaluate all possible ways to reinforce the federal capital punishment as a useful mechanism to punish crimes, which especially includes carrying it out. In turn, it orders the Department to take all necessary measures to obtain a reevaluation of the judicial precedents that have limited the authority of state and federal governments to impose the capital sentence. The Federal Bureau of Prisons will work with state prison systems to ensure there are sufficient supplies of lethal drugs and resources to carry out executions.

Finally, and in response to President Biden's commutation of the 37 sentences for federal crimes, "the Department of Justice will proceed with the following directive: first, a public forum will be opened for the victims' relatives to express how these commutations affected them personally; second, the capital sentence for those sentenced commuted by state legislation will be sought within current law, after consultation with relatives and other interested parties; third, and finally, the necessary measures will be taken so that “The conditions of confinement of those commuted correspond to the nature of their crimes, criminal history and other pertinent considerations.”

It is, therefore, not only about tariffs, but about an orgy of cruelty as a state policy, ranging from blackmail to Ukraine, the promotion of genocide in Gaza and the kidnapping of people and their sending to Bukele's super prison. In short, with this executive order there is the new enthronement of capital punishment, which the EU Human Rights Convention radically prohibits in its first article and abolished in Mexico in 2005.

In everything stated and in the way in which they express it, they clearly present their desperation, with lies and lack of respect for the truth and scientific knowledge, since not only is it already proven that capital punishment has no intimidating force superior to life imprisonment, which is also seen in the fact that homicide rates do not vary depending on whether or not each State has capital punishment. It also breaks with a very clear trend towards the reduction of sentences and capital executions in the last 20 years, as an expression of the rejection that their cruelty entails and to avoid the irreversible condemnation of innocent people, thus they have been reduced from the 98 executed in 1999 to 25 since 2019 and following. On the other hand, more than 8 States have abolished capital punishment or have adopted moratoriums in the last 10 years, so that currently 27 States have abolished it, four of them are subject to a moratorium, meaning that it is maintained in only 23 States.

The executive order is raised against one of the most important values ​​of the Rule of Law, which is the prohibition of establishing retroactive punishments, such as executing capital sentences for those who have had them commuted by the previous president and their death replaced by life imprisonment. Professor Bessler will suffer, as he has made it clear that the Marquis of Beccaria's work was in all the libraries of the founding fathers of the United States. It is, furthermore, a humiliation for more than half of the American citizens who are against capital punishment. The decline in favor of the death penalty has brought the figure down from 80% in 1994 to 53%. But extremists abuse and lie very successfully.