“Nothing is certain”: Emmanuel Macron warned on Tuesday June 30 against the “return” of the debate on the death penalty in France, insisting that “nothing is certain”, 45 years after its abolition. “The battle for abolition (…) is eminently contemporary because today, in our societies, this debate is coming back,” declared the Head of State at the 9th World Congress against the death penalty in Paris.
“Because today, in our society, many are starting to think again that the death penalty would be a response in confusion of principles and language,” he added. “Many people pretend to believe that (abolition) is obvious” but “the risks remain in many countries” and “nothing is certain”, insisted the Head of State, describing this fight as “existential for our democratic societies”.
The debate resurfaces in France with each news item that shakes society, most recently with the murders of little Lyhanna and young Louis. More than two thirds (68%) of French people say they are in favor of a referendum on the reinstatement of the death penalty for crimes affecting children, according to a survey by the CSA institute for CNEWS, Europe 1 and the JDD published on June 14.
The death penalty “does not deter”
“The death penalty has never made a society safer. Never. Because it does not dissuade. This is false. This was shown, observed, measured,” pointed out Emmanuel Macron. “It has never had the dissuasive value that certain powers, often authoritarian, which defend it, would like to grant it,” he continued.
If 114 states have definitively abandoned capital punishment, several countries are marked by a “resurgence of executions, used as tools of political repression, social control or response to security crises”, according to the French ambassador for human rights, Isabelle Lonvis-Rome.
“Whatever one of us may have done, we do not have the power to deny this belonging to our humanity,” added Emmanuel Macron, seeing in it a “foundation of all our democratic societies”.
According to the NGO Together Against the Death Penalty (ECPM), organizer of the congress, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are the four states having carried out the highest number of executions in 2024. The Iranian authorities executed at least 1,639 people in 2025, a record since 1989, according to Iran Human Rights, based in Norway, and ECPM.
