Lebanon Abolishes the Death Penalty, Then Passes Broad Amnesty Law a Day Later

Lebanon's parliament voted Tuesday, August 11, to abolish the death penalty for all crimes, replacing it with life imprisonment with hard labor, according to a statement from the parliament speaker's office. The next day, Wednesday, August 12, lawmakers followed up with a general amnesty law, the first of its kind since 1991, passed by a show-of-hands vote, according to Lebanon's National News Agency and reported by Al Jazeera.

Both laws move the same direction: fewer executions, fewer people sitting in Lebanese prisons for years without trial.

Subject to formal signature by President Joseph Aoun, Lebanon becomes the 129th country worldwide to fully abolish capital punishment, according to a post from the University of Oxford's Faculty of Law blog. That makes Lebanon only the second of the 22 Arab League member states, after Djibouti, to reach full abolition. Aoun's government had already backed the bill, according to the BBC as cited by the New York Post.

The death penalty had not actually been used in Lebanon since January 17, 2004, according to Amnesty International. But it was not dormant on paper. Death sentences kept coming down under 41 different legal provisions covering treason, espionage, terrorism and intentional homicide, according to the Oxford Law blog, which cited Justice Ministry data showing two death sentences in 2023, two in 2024, and one in 2025. As of the end of January 2026, 85 people remained on death row, according to Amnesty. The New York Post noted, citing France24, that a death sentence was issued as recently as the Monday before the vote.

Hezbollah's parliamentary bloc voted against the abolition bill, according to the New York Post. Sentences under the old law required sign-off from the justice minister, prime minister and president to carry out, meaning executions were legally possible even during the two-decade pause.

The push originated with the Lebanese Association for Civil Rights, which drafted the bill and got seven members of parliament to submit it to the Parliamentary Human Rights Committee on October 7, 2025, according to Amnesty International. The cabinet gave a favorable opinion on November 20, 2025. The bill cleared the Human Rights Committee on February 23, 2026, the Justice Committee and a Joint Committee on June 2 and July 9, 2026, respectively, before the full parliamentary vote on August 11.

Heba Morayef, Amnesty International's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, called it "a major milestone and a victory for human rights," saying the move "transforms a precarious hiatus in executions into lasting legal protection upholding the right to life." Amnesty is now pushing Lebanon to commute all existing death sentences and ratify the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the treaty that locks in abolition under international law.

The Amnesty Law Is the Messier Story

A day after the death penalty vote, parliament passed a general amnesty law that will reduce sentences and free detainees on a larger scale. Lawmaker Imad al-Hout, who backed the bill, said it converts death and life sentences into 17 "prison years," which works out to 12 years and nine months of actual time served, since a Lebanese prison year is calculated as nine months, according to Al Jazeera. The law also orders the release of defendants who have been detained more than 12 prison years without a final verdict.

The justification is real and measurable. Lebanon's National Human Rights Commission reported in 2025 that the country's prisons were running at 300 percent capacity, with at least 6,268 inmates as of the end of March. Many of those people have been sitting in pretrial detention for years without ever being convicted of anything. A justice system that holds people that long without trial has a legitimate overcrowding and due-process problem, and reducing that backlog is a defensible goal on its own terms.

But the amnesty law is not without a real cost, and the objection deserves to be stated plainly: families of Lebanese soldiers and security personnel killed in past attacks are worried that people convicted of killing their relatives could walk free or serve dramatically reduced time, according to Al Jazeera. Much of the push for amnesty grew out of the 2024 collapse of Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria, after Lebanon had jailed large numbers of people, many from the Sunni-majority city of Tripoli, over Syrian civil war-linked violence including attacks on the Lebanese army and bombing plots. Hezbollah and its allies in the Baalbek and Hermel regions have separately been pushing amnesty for their own detained communities.

Lebanese authorities have not yet released a number on how many people will actually walk free or have sentences cut under the new law. AP News covered the amnesty vote but its available reporting did not include specifics on affected numbers either, framing the law simply as "controversial."

What happens next runs on two tracks. The death penalty law heads to President Aoun for signature and publication in the Official Gazette before taking legal effect. Separately, Amnesty International is calling on Beirut to commute the sentences of the 85 people currently on death row rather than leave that conversion to happen case by case. Neither the exact number of people released under the amnesty law nor the fate of any pending appeals from victims' families has been resolved as of this week.