I Book Review: Human Rights in the Foreign Policy of the Netherlands

Published date01 March 2005
Date01 March 2005
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/016934410502300113
Subject MatterPart D: DocumentationI Book Review
160
capital of abolitionist evangelism’. Not only is the death penalty no longer in use,
European countries have also taken it upon themselves to convince the rest of the
world that executions are bad. There seems to be a special fervor in the protests
when those executions take place in the US. Although Zimring does not say so
explicitly, it seems that the righteousness is often mixed with a slice of anti-
Americanism.
Zimring rightfully points to the fact that there are great differences within the US
as to the death penalty. More than 80 percent of all executions since 1976 took place
in the South, nearly half of them in the state of Texas alone. Several states in the
Northeast and the Midwest (Wisconsin, Minneapolis) abolished the death penalty
more than a century before England or France even considered abolition and have
successfully fought any attempts to reinstate it. Zimring also analyses the state
execution rates, by correlating them to the number of people on death row, showing
Virginia, Texas, Missouri and South Carolina (all in the South) as the states with the
highest risk that once on death row an inmate will indeed be executed. In his own
book on the death penalty in the US, Contradictions of American Capital Punishment
(Oxford University Press, New York, 2003), he provides a very plausible theory on
the background of these regional differences, seeking an explanation in the
vigilante traditions in those states that now execute more often. His lesson for all
who want to affect the death penalty in the US is very important: take account of the
differences between the states, including the legal procedures that govern
application of the death penalty.
In sum, these books provide important and deep insights in the way capital
punishment is applied in a number of jurisdictions around the world. Obviously,
they do not cover all facets or every country in the world (i.e. China). Nevertheless,
they are crucial reading for anyone who desires to send the gallows and the lethal
injection to the annals of history.
P. Baehr, M. Castermans-Holleman and F. Gru
¨nfeld,
Human Rights in the
Foreign Policy of the Netherlands
, Intersentia, Antwerp-Oxford-New York,
2002, xii + 250 p., ISBN 90-5095-221-6*
The book produced by these three leading scholars in the field of international
protection of human rights deals with a very interesting and sensitive issue: the role
human rights have played, and are still playing, in the implementation of Dutch
foreign policy. It is an analysis of particular interest, since the Dutch Government
itself has placed explicitly human rights as an essential dimension of its foreign
policy in several formal policy documents. The most relevant official document is a
Memorandum issued on 3 May 1979 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the
Netherlands under the title Human Rights and Foreign Policy, in which the Dutch
Government underlined its main principles and guidelines concerning the role of
human rights in its overall foreign policy. Another important reason to explain the
interest of the study is the general perception of the Netherlands, between both the
international academic community and the NGO community (with the exception of
Dutch NGOs, more critical towards its Government), as a model of a State that has
Documentation
* Felipe Go´mez Isa is Professor of Public International Law and researcher at the Institute of Human
Rights of the University of Deusto (Bilbao), Spain.

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