The School of Law of City University of Hong Kong, in collaboration with the Jindal Global Law School (India) and the Office of the European Union to Hong Kong and Macau, is organising an International Conference on Capital Punishment in Asia: Progress and Prospects for Law Reform. The Conference will take place in Hong Kong on 4-5 November 2011.

In the last twenty years enormous progress has been made in many parts of the world towards the progressive abolition of death penalty in pursuance of the December 1971 resolution of the UN General Assembly (A/RES/28/57). Of the 196 member states of the UN, 104 countries have abolished the death penalty. Another 34 countries have ceased executions and appear to international bodies to be committed not to resume them.

However, the situation is not so promising in Asia on the front of capital punishment. Amnesty International regularly estimates that a large majority of all executions in the world take place in Asia.The People's Republic of China (PRC) maintains absolute secrecy about the number of executions, despite the 2007 decision requiring review of all death penalty verdicts by the Supreme People's Court. The death penalty in India continues to be imposed under the principle that it is applied only to the rarest of rare cases. Singapore, which had the world's highest execution rate per head of population in the 1990s, insists on the death penalty being the mandatory punishment for murder and for certain drugs offences. Pakistan still sentences a large number of persons to death annually. Taiwan appeared to be well on the road to abolition only for executions to be revived in 2010. In Japan too, the prospects for ceasing executions looked good only for the hopes of abolitionists to be dashed. Thailand also returned to executions after a period of abstinence.

There is, therefore, a great deal to understand, discuss and debate about the death penalty in Asia. This conference will provide a platform to consider in detail the potential for further law reforms in several key Asian countries such as the PRC, India, Pakistan, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Leading scholars, practitioners and civil society representatives from all over the world will examine in comparative and inter-disciplinary ways various aspects of the conference theme in view of their research, professional experience and advocacy on capital punishment.