Article content continued

In other words, Europe took away the drugs and told America that it ought to be ashamed of itself.

Still, to find execution-envy in Europe we need not look much farther than anti-immigrant Eurosceptics. In the United Kingdom, capital punishment support is highest among fiercely anti-immigrant UKIP voters, although UKIP spokespeople are coy about capital punishment, defending their supporters’ right to answer the “question that should be allowed to be raised” so that the party itself need only innocently ask it. In France, the National Front’s Marine Le Pen — political and familial heir to a man who recently said that “Monsieur Ebola can solve the problem” of African immigration “in three months” — wants a referendum on capital punishment and suggests executions “should exist in our legal arsenal.” But Greece’s Golden Dawn, never one to hint at what could be furiously bellowed, has called for nothing less than bringing back the death penalty for “immigrant assassins.”

But if links between racism and state executions are still unclear, we can always glance back at the United States. There, one study found that a black defendant is almost twice as likely to get the death penalty as a white one and the murder of a white person makes a death sentence four times more likely than the murder of a black one. Another found that if black death-row-prisoners were white, a third of them wouldn’t be there. Yet another found that prosecutors seek the death penalty more for white victims than for black victims.

Orban promises that “Hungary will stop at nothing when it comes to protecting its citizens.” It’s no coincidence that this seems to including challenging the EU on both immigration and execution.

It seems the philosophy is: if you can’t keep them out, kill them.

Shannon Gormley is a Canadian journalist.