A handful of the world鈥檚 industrialized democracies 鈥 including the US, Japan, and Taiwan 鈥 still have laws permitting the death penalty. But of that short list, only one nation has a moratorium on state-sanctioned execution: South Korea.
South Korea has not executed anyone since the end of 1997, when . The moratorium was enacted in Feb. 1998 by and former President Kim Dae-Jung, who himself had been sentenced to death by a South Korean military court in 1980. (His prison term was suspended two years later).