Switzerland debated the death penalty for more than two centuries before it was abolished. Enlightenment thinkers questioned it in the 18th century, but executions continued into the 20th. The last civilian execution took place in 1940. Capital punishment disappeared from ordinary criminal law in 1942 and from military law in 1992. The new federal constitution, which came into force in 2000, explicitly prohibited it.
Debate began long before abolition. In 18th-century Bern, reformers influenced by thinkers such as Cesare Beccaria, Voltaire and Montesquieu challenged torture and harsh punishment. But reform came slowly.
Executions were still public events in the 19th century. Research by Sarah Bloch describes them as carefully staged spectacles meant to punish the offender, deter the crowd and restore public order. In Bern, 58 people were executed between 1805 and 1861. Most came from poor backgrounds. Hanging, breaking on the wheel and beheading were all used; from the 1830s Bern relied on the sword.
The death penalty did not disappear at the same pace across Switzerland. Nidwalden carried out its last execution on April 29th 1817, when Franz Joseph Käslin was put to death. Later, arguments made by the lawyers in an 1856 case helped push the canton towards abolition. Nidwalden thus went more than a century without an execution before neighbouring Obwalden carried out Switzerland’s last civilian one.
Bern followed later. Its last execution was that of Johann Kläntschi on December 9th 1861. Afterwards, death sentences there were commuted to prison terms.
At federal level, Switzerland also changed course. The revised constitution of 1874 banned the death penalty throughout the country. In 1879 voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing the cantons to restore it. Bern chose not to.
Switzerland did not abandon capital punishment in one clean break; it faded out canton by canton before federal law settled the question. The patchwork survived well into the 20th century.
On October 18th 1940 Hans Vollenweider was guillotined at Sarnen, in Obwalden, after being sentenced to death for the murder of a policeman, Alois von Moos. Vollenweider had also killed two other men. He was the last civilian executed in Switzerland.
The contrast between Nidwalden and Obwalden is striking. Nidwalden had not executed anyone since 1817 and had prohibited the death penalty in its constitution in 1877. Had Vollenweider committed his crime just across the cantonal border, he might not have faced the death penalty.
The Swiss Criminal Code, which came into force in 1942, abolished the death penalty for civilian offences across Switzerland. But military law still allowed it. During the second world war Swiss military courts handed down 33 death sentences, of which 17 were carried out, all in cases involving military espionage for Nazi Germany.
Military capital punishment remained on the books until 1992. In 2000 the new federal constitution completed the process by explicitly banning the death penalty.
In 1985 an initiative to impose the death penalty for drug trafficking failed to gather enough signatures. In 2010 another proposal, this time seeking capital punishment for murders involving sexual abuse, caused a brief uproar. Its sponsors withdrew it a day after it appeared in the Federal Gazette.
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