How Switzerland abolished the death penalty

The last civilian execution took place on 18 October 1940, yet Switzerland needed another 52 years to remove capital punishment from every part of its legal order. Hans Vollenweider was guillotined at Sarnen, in Obwalden, after being sentenced for killing policeman Alois von Moos and two other men. His execution came during a period when the country’s cantons still carried different legal traditions, and where military law preserved a separate power to impose death.

The episode remains a sharp entry point into Swiss constitutional history. Capital punishment did not vanish through one decisive national vote. Enlightenment criticism, cantonal reforms, federal constitutional changes and revisions to criminal and military law each closed part of the system. The process began with arguments against torture and harsh punishment in the 18th century. It ended with the Constitution that entered into force in 2000, which expressly prohibited the death penalty.

Switzerland’s abolition story therefore tracks the growth of legal equality across the federation. A person’s exposure to execution once depended heavily on the canton, the offence and the court involved. By the end of the 20th century, those distinctions had disappeared from Swiss law. The country’s present constitutional position reflects that long accumulation of reforms, rather than a single moment of national conversion.

Bern executed 58 people between 1805 and 1861, turning punishment into a public performance of state power. Researchers describe these events as carefully staged spectacles designed to punish the offender, deter the crowd and restore public order. Most of those executed came from poor backgrounds, revealing how class and criminal justice intersected in the canton’s 19th century record.

The methods changed with the period. Authorities used hanging, breaking on the wheel and beheading. From the 1830s, Bern relied on the sword. These practices unfolded in public, where the crowd became part of the ritual. The execution communicated the authority of the state as much as it ended the prisoner’s life.

Enlightenment thinkers had already begun challenging that logic. In 18th century Bern, reformers drew on Cesare Beccaria, Voltaire and Montesquieu to question torture and extreme punishments. Their arguments did not produce immediate abolition. Swiss authorities continued to treat execution as a legitimate instrument of order for decades.

Bern’s last execution, that of Johann Kläntschi on 9 December 1861, closed the canton’s practice. Death sentences were subsequently commuted to prison terms. The shift showed how abolition could advance through administrative and judicial practice before lawmakers completed the formal legal change.

Nidwalden stopped executing people in 1817, while neighbouring Obwalden carried out the last civilian execution more than 120 years later. On 29 April 1817, Franz Joseph Käslin became the last person executed in Nidwalden. The canton later prohibited capital punishment in its constitution in 1877. Arguments made by lawyers in an 1856 case helped push the canton further towards abolition.

The contrast with Obwalden exposes the limits of a fragmented legal system. Vollenweider was executed in Sarnen in 1940, across the cantonal border from a jurisdiction that had long abandoned the practice. Had he committed the same crime in Nidwalden, the legal consequences could have been different. Swiss federalism allowed cantons to retain distinct criminal traditions well into the modern era.

The federal government began narrowing that variation in 1874. The revised Federal Constitution banned capital punishment across the country. Five years later, however, voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing cantons to restore it. Bern chose not to do so, illustrating how national law and cantonal political choices continued to interact.

Abolition therefore moved unevenly. Some cantons ended executions through constitutional provisions or sentencing practice. Others retained the power until federal criminal law imposed a common rule. The result was a gradual legal convergence rather than a single nationwide rupture.

The 1942 Swiss Criminal Code abolished capital punishment for civilian offences, but military courts still issued death sentences during the Second World War. The code came into force two years after Vollenweider’s execution and established a national rule for ordinary criminal justice. The military exception remained significant because Switzerland maintained separate legal powers for wartime discipline, espionage and military offences.

Military courts handed down 33 death sentences during the war. Seventeen were carried out, all in cases involving military espionage for Nazi Germany. The remaining sentences were not carried out. These cases form the final substantial chapter in Switzerland’s use of capital punishment and show that civilian abolition did not immediately settle the question across the state.

The military provision stayed on the books until 1992. Its removal completed the statutory abolition of execution, although the constitutional settlement came later. In 2000, the new Federal Constitution explicitly prohibited the death penalty, placing the principle at the highest level of Swiss law.

This sequence matters because it separates three legal developments: the end of civilian executions in practice, the abolition of civilian capital punishment in the Criminal Code, and the elimination of military capital punishment. Swiss law reached its current position through those successive steps.

Switzerland’s constitutional ban has faced political challenges, but recent campaigns to restore the death penalty have failed before reaching a national vote. In 1985, an initiative seeking capital punishment for drug trafficking did not gather enough signatures. In 2010, sponsors proposed the death penalty for murders involving sexual abuse. They withdrew the proposal one day after it appeared in the Federal Gazette.

Those episodes show that abolition did not erase public anger over serious crime. They also show the barriers created by Swiss direct democracy and constitutional law. A proposal must first secure the required signatures and then survive the political process. The 1985 campaign failed at the signature stage. The 2010 proposal ended almost immediately after publication.

The 2000 Constitution gives the prohibition clear legal status. It places the death penalty outside the legitimate powers of the Confederation and the cantons, closing the regional variation that shaped earlier Swiss history. Criminal justice can still change through legislation, sentencing policy and prison reform, but execution is excluded from that debate.

For Swiss citizens, the abolition story is therefore also a story about constitutional restraint. Enlightenment criticism, cantonal experience, federal standardisation and human rights principles accumulated across more than two centuries. The result is a legal system in which the state may punish serious crimes, but cannot impose the ultimate irreversible sentence.