Several initiatives were held across the country as Portugal celebrated becoming the first sovereign nation in Europe to cease capital punishment and also one of the first in the world to do so.
The death penalty had its first reform in Portugal in 1852 when it was abolished for political crimes. This was followed in 1867 when civil crimes were no longer subject to capital punishment.
Portugal has long been a front runner in its calls for the abolition of the death penalty. Earlier this year, it used an opportunity to address the United Nations to call on countries that still have the death penalty to implement a ‘de facto’ moratorium as a first step towards “total abolition” of the death penalty.
According to the Portuguese Foreign Minister, Augusto Santos Silva, Portugal rejects all the reasons and arguments that attempt to justify the application of the death penalty.
He added that the country calls on all countries that still execute its citizens to establish a moratorium as a first step towards a world without the death penalty.
He stressed the importance that Portugal gives to the “evolution of the death penalty” as the country was a front runner in abolishing it “precisely 150 years ago.”
According to Amnesty International, just over a thousand people were executed across the globe in 2016.
The organisation has been extremely vocal in supporting nations such as Portugal in its calls to eliminate the death penalty, arguing that since 1973, a total of 150 prisoners in the United States who were sent to death row were later exonerated.