Frequently forgotten, children of parents sentenced to death or executed carry a heavy emotional and psychological burden that can amount to the violation of their human rights.
This trauma can occur at any and all stages of the capital punishment of a parent: arrest, trial, sentencing, death row stays, execution dates, execution itself, and its aftermath. The repeated cycles of hope and disappointment that can accompany all of these stages can have a long-term impact, occasionally well into adulthood.
Stigmatization from the community in which they live and the loss of a parent at the hands of a state all reinforce deep instability in the child’s day to day life. In line with the 30th anniversary of the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (20 November 1989), the focus of this World Day is on children and their human rights. According to Amnesty International, at least 19,336 people in the world were on death row at the end of 2018. Behind this statistic, we can only guess how many of those individuals have children- and conversely how many children have had a parent who has been executed.
Sentencing a parent to death may provoke a wild range of psychological (fear and/or anger, embarrass, loss of self-esteem, eating and/or sleeping disorders, deliria, post-traumatic stress), and behavioral reactions (loss of interest for playing and/or for school, self-inflicted violence, self-exclusion, etc). Children of parents sentenced to death are more likely to be engaged in alcohol consumption or to adopt a criminal behavior.
Although it is difficult to arrive accurately at number of children who have at least one parent under sentence of death – or who has been executed – there are methods to find an estimation. This year, the World Day Against the Death Penalty will also be the occasion to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), adopted by the General Assembly on 20 November 1989. Today, the CRC has been ratified by almost every State in the world5. The CRC guarantees every child the right to « appropriate legal protection»6 without distinction of any kind as to « the child’s or his or her parent’s or legal guardian’s race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national, ethnic or social origin, property, disability, birth or other status » and so, independent from the status of a parent under a death sentence or who has been executed.
Children: unseen victims of the death penalty
The death penalty in practice:
• 106 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes
• 8 countries have abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes
• 28 countries are abolitionist in practice
• 56 countries are retentionist
• 20 countries carried out executions in 2018
• In 2018, the top 10 executioners were China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Iraq, Egypt, USA, Japan, Pakistan and Singapore.
To know more about the death penalty…
… all over the world: read the facts & figures
… and the rights of the child whose a parent is under a death sentence: read the leaflet, the detailed factsheet and the briefing tools for practitioners
