Europe’s Death Penalty Lesson Is Still Incomplete

A new Council of Europe study warns that pupils often learn about executions, but not enough about why abolition became a democratic standard

Europe has not carried out an execution within the Council of Europe area since 1997, yet a new study warns that this achievement may be poorly understood by the next generation. The Council of Europe says history lessons often describe capital punishment as a fact of the past, while giving less attention to the movements, legal arguments and human-rights principles that led to its abolition.

The findings, released in Strasbourg on Monday, place education at the centre of a wider human-rights debate. At a time when global executions are rising and pro-death-penalty rhetoric has reappeared in parts of Europe, the study argues that abolition cannot be treated as a settled inheritance.

The Council of Europe study, carried out by the Observatory on History Teaching in Europe, examined how the death penalty and its abolition are presented in history education across 19 countries. It found that curricula and textbooks frequently refer to capital punishment, from ancient legal codes to political show trials, but often give weaker treatment to why societies rejected it.

That gap matters because abolition was not automatic. It was the result of political pressure, legal reform, public argument and the gradual recognition that state execution is incompatible with human dignity and the right to life. The Council of Europe has made abolition a defining condition of membership, helping make its 46-state area a death penalty-free zone.

The study also found that teachers often address the subject on their own initiative and want clearer support, especially for explaining abolition in a global perspective. This is a practical concern as much as a philosophical one. If young people learn only that executions happened, without understanding why European states renounced them, they may see abolition as historical luck rather than a civic choice.

A fragile achievement

Europe’s abolitionist position is unusually strong by global standards. No execution has taken place in any Council of Europe member state for more than a quarter of a century. In 2025, Amnesty International recorded no death sentences or executions in Europe and Central Asia, while Belarus, long the region’s major exception, saw no new recorded death sentences or executions for the first year since Alexander Lukashenko came to power in 1994.

Yet the global picture is moving in the other direction. Amnesty International’s 2025 figures recorded 2,707 executions worldwide, excluding thousands believed to have taken place in China. The organisation said this was a sharp rise from 2024 and the highest figure it had recorded since 1981.

Those numbers give the Council of Europe study a sharper edge. Abolition is not only a European legal norm; it is part of the continent’s foreign-policy language and human-rights identity. But that identity can weaken if citizens are not taught how recently and deliberately it was built.

Why memory is part of rights protection

The death penalty is often debated through criminal justice, deterrence or public anger after violent crime. The study asks schools to widen that lens. It points to questions of legal decision-making, moral reasoning and the arguments used both for and against abolition. In doing so, it treats history teaching as a democratic safeguard.

That approach is important because support for capital punishment can grow when rights are presented as abstractions rather than as protections created in response to real abuses. The same applies beyond Europe. The European Times has previously reported on the continued use of executions in countries such as Saudi Arabia, where human-rights concerns around capital punishment include opaque procedures, vulnerable defendants and the execution of foreign nationals.

For European educators, the challenge is not to turn classrooms into campaign platforms. It is to make the history of abolition intelligible: who argued for it, who resisted it, what legal instruments changed, and why the state’s power to kill came to be seen as incompatible with modern human rights.

The study arrives as the Council of Europe continues to promote universal abolition and support youth-focused initiatives against the death penalty. Its message is restrained but urgent: rights endure when they are explained, debated and understood.

For Europe, the absence of executions is one of the continent’s clearest human-rights achievements. But the new research suggests that a legal ban alone is not enough. If young Europeans inherit abolition without learning its reasons, they may be less prepared to defend it when fear, anger or political opportunism bring the death penalty back into public argument.

The lesson, then, is not only about punishment. It is about democratic memory. A right that appears self-evident to one generation may need to be taught carefully to the next.