BEIRUT — For twenty-two years, eighty-five people waited in Lebanon’s prisons with death sentences over their heads and no execution date in sight. The Lebanese state had stopped carrying out executions in January 2004, a quiet decision by successive governments that produced a moratorium without a legal foundation. On Monday, parliament gave that moratorium a foundation.
Lebanon voted to abolish the death penalty for all crimes, replacing capital punishment with life imprisonment with hard labor. The decision makes Lebanon the first Arab country and the first state in the Middle East to formally eliminate the sentence. Globally, it becomes the 114th country to have done so.
The vote closes a legislative chapter that began in October 2025, when a coalition of civil society organizations submitted a draft law to parliament. Three groups drove the campaign: the Lebanese Association for Civil Rights, the National Campaign for the Abolition of the Death Penalty in Lebanon, and Association Justice and Mercy, the Lebanese organization known by its French acronym AJEM. Their argument combined the moral case against irreversible punishment with the practical observation that Lebanon had already been functioning without executions for more than two decades. They were asking parliament to confirm, in law, what the state had already accepted in practice.
Heba Morayef, the regional director for Amnesty International, called the vote a landmark victory. “Justice must be rooted in human rights,” she said, “not in an irreversible and cruel punishment.” Amnesty International had campaigned alongside Lebanese organizations throughout the legislative process, maintaining pressure on members of parliament as the bill moved through committee reviews that stretched across most of a year.
The United Nations human rights office welcomed the vote on Monday. The reaction from international bodies came quickly because Lebanon’s decision carries symbolic weight beyond its borders. No other Arab state had taken this step. The moratorium had been noted by human rights monitors, but a moratorium is not the same as abolition. It can be reversed by a new government or a change in political mood. Monday’s vote removes that reversibility.
What happens to the eighty-five people currently on death row is the question the law leaves open. In most countries that have abolished capital punishment, resentencing follows, but the process is rarely automatic. Lebanese courts will need to revisit each case, and prosecutors who argued for the original sentences may contest the resentencing process. Human rights organizations say that hearings should be transparent and that those individuals should receive substantive review.
The contrast with the broader region is not subtle. In Iran, where protests in January 2026 led to mass arrests, protesters have been executed, with Amnesty warning that at least sixty more remain at risk. Saudi Arabia has carried out hundreds of executions in recent years, including for drug offenses. Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and several Gulf states maintain active death rows. Lebanon’s vote does not change their legal frameworks, but it establishes that the regional consensus on capital punishment has its first formal break.
The campaign in Lebanon was decades long. Civil society organizations had been pushing for abolition since the 1990s, working through a political system structured along sectarian lines that makes broad-based legislation difficult to achieve. The bill that reached parliament in October 2025 was not the first attempt; earlier legislative efforts had stalled at the committee stage. What changed, advocates say, was sustained organizing by LACR, AJEM, and the National Campaign, which built relationships across political factions and made the abolition argument in terms that cut across Lebanon’s confessional divisions.
Lebanon’s political class has been occupied with existential questions for the better part of three years, navigating the consequences of the war with Israel that devastated southern Lebanon and the Beqaa, the diplomatic processes around Hezbollah’s disarmament, and the separate tracks of reconstruction financing and international engagement. Lebanon’s Hezbollah disarmament negotiations dominated the political calendar for much of 2026. That parliament found room in that calendar for the death penalty vote reflects the degree to which the civil society campaign had built legislative momentum that could no longer be deferred.
The global picture shows Lebanon joining a majority of countries that have formally abolished capital punishment. The political outliers are significant: the United States maintains the sentence at the federal level and in several states, even as courts have narrowed its application through rulings on cruel and unusual punishment. The death penalty debate in Alabama, where a judge blocked a nitrogen execution as unconstitutional, illustrates that the question is nowhere near settled in countries that have not taken Lebanon’s step.
The law abolishes capital punishment with no exceptions specified for crime category. Under Lebanon’s previous framework, the death penalty applied to crimes including terrorism, treason, drug trafficking, and murder. All of those crimes will now carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment with hard labor. For families of victims who had sought the death penalty in criminal proceedings, the change may be difficult. For the eighty-five individuals whose sentences are now subject to revision, it ends the possibility of execution.
The civil society organizations that drove the campaign will now shift their attention to the resentencing process, monitoring how Lebanese courts handle the eighty-five cases and whether the transition from death row to life imprisonment happens equitably. Amnesty International said Lebanon’s decision demonstrates that sustained human rights advocacy can change the law even where the political environment makes change seem distant. The vote was the milestone. The work it opened is ongoing.
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