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Afterword
- Author: United Nations for Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner
- Main Title: Death Penalty and the Victims , pp 326-331
- Publication Date: October 2016
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.18356/0c58e7c0-en
- Language: English
In 1931, George Orwell famously described a hanging. As the condemned man was marched, in handcuffs, to the gallows, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle—an ordinary, tender, very human gesture. Orwell wrote: “Till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man…the unspeakable wrongness.” What Orwell understood so well was how human reason, tugged by the presence of one puddle placed inconveniently in the path of a man about to die, demanded a more complex human response. What he saw was fundamentally a form of revenge. And revenge, however dressed up it was by a judicial process, still remained a crude act of state vengeance. And with 8,000 years of practice behind it, drawn from the belief that life, even though not created by society, can nevertheless be withdrawn by it, the urge for vengeance had separated humanity from its own, very necessary, sense of decency. This notion of justice in the form of revenge is, however, changing.
© United Nations
ISBN (PDF):
9789210583954
Book DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18356/cb965d8f-en
Related Subject(s):
Human Rights and Refugees
Sustainable Development Goals:
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