The Justification of Punishment and Human Rights

I. Introduction: Sentencing Theory and Human Rights Human rights play an important role in the regulation of punishment. In view of this, the lack of sustained consideration of their relevance is surprising.

Although human rights principles provide state authorities with little guidance in determining the ‘appropriate sentence’,2 they nevertheless set important limits on the choice and imposition of punishment. These restrictions differ in scope and importance from the type of limits most frequently discussed in sentencing theory. The notions of justice or fairness in punishment theory are often portrayed as matters of intuition and connected to the idea of propor- tionality between the sentence and the offence: ‘People have a sense that pun- ishments scaled