Lebanon abolished the death penalty on 11 August 2026, the second Arab League state to do it, after Djibouti

Lebanon's parliament voted on 11 August 2026 to abolish capital punishment and replace it with life imprisonment. It is the first abolition by a state in the Arab Middle East, but it is not, as some accounts have it, the first in the Arab world. Djibouti, a member of the Arab League in the Horn of Africa, abolished the death penalty in 1995.

The Death Penalty Research Unit at the University of Oxford, which published an account of the vote on the day, describes Lebanon as the second Arab League member state to abolish capital punishment for all crimes, after Djibouti, and as the 129th country to do so. That last figure depends on how the counting is done. Wikipedia's tally of states that have abolished the death penalty for all crimes puts Lebanon at 114. Both numbers were retrieved for this article and neither is reconcilable with the other without knowing which category of abolition each is measuring, and the sources do not say.

The vote closed a moratorium that had lasted 22 years in practice. Lebanon's last executions were in January 2004, when three men convicted of murder were put to death. The law provided for hanging and firing squad, and an execution required the signatures of the justice minister, the prime minister and the president. The Oxford account records that capital punishment was retained across 41 separate legal provisions, covering murder, espionage, treason, terrorism, collaboration with Israeli forces, rape, aggravated robbery, arson, sabotage causing death, importation of nuclear or toxic waste, and certain military offences including desertion.

The legislative route was slow and mostly civil society driven. The abolitionist campaign in Lebanon dates to 1983, when Walid Slaibi and Ougarit Younan began organising for it. Abolition bills were proposed in 2004, 2008 and 2012 and went nowhere. In October 2025 the Lebanese Association for Civil Rights submitted Bill 160/2025. Government approval followed in November 2025, a parliamentary committee approved the bill in February 2026, and parliament adopted it on 11 August 2026.

How many people the change affects is disputed. The Oxford Death Penalty Research Unit puts about 85 people under sentence of death at the end of 2025. The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty's country profile for Lebanon, which does not appear to have been updated for the vote, gives roughly 171 and records no executions in 2023, 2024 or 2025. Neither figure could be checked against a Lebanese official source retrievable for this article, and none of the sources retrieved sets out what happens to existing death sentences on commencement, or when the law commences.

Lebanon has not ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the treaty that commits parties to abolition, and it abstained on United Nations moratorium resolutions in 2010 and 2012. Whether abolition is now followed by ratification is one of the tests of how durable the vote is.

The regional context makes the timing conspicuous. Most states in the region retain capital punishment, including Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, Oman, Libya and Jordan. Turkey abolished it for all offences in 2004. Israel abolished it for almost all crimes by legislation in 1954, and then in 2026 passed a law reintroducing capital punishment for certain terrorism convictions, a movement in the opposite direction.

The sharpest contrast was on the same date. On 11 August 2026, the day Lebanon's parliament voted, the Fourth Criminal Court in Damascus sentenced nine men to death, including the deposed president Bashar al-Assad, his brother Maher, and Atef Najib, the former political security chief in Daraa who was the only defendant present. Syria's official news agency reported the convictions as covering premeditated murder, torture, arbitrary detention and crimes against humanity. Al Jazeera reported the sentences from the courtroom the same day.

That juxtaposition is the reason the Lebanese vote is worth more attention than it received. Two neighbouring states, on one day, moved in opposite directions on the same penalty: one removing it from 41 provisions of its statute book after 22 years of not using it, the other imposing it on nine men, eight of whom are beyond its reach.

What is not yet known is the operative text of the Lebanese law, whether hard labour attaches to the replacement life sentence in every case, how the roughly 85 to 171 people already sentenced will be dealt with, and whether the reform survives contact with a political system that has repeatedly deferred it since 2004. Nor is it clear whether the vote was contested: none of the sources retrieved for this article records a division or a tally.