Capital punishment in the United Kingdom espionage from "all spies for the enemy" to spies on naval ships or bases. Later, the Armed Forces Act 1981 abolished the death penalty for espionage. (The Official Secrets Act 1911 had created another offence of espionage which carried a maximum sentence of fourteen years.) Beheading was abolished as a method of execution for treason in 1973. Hanging, however, remained available until 1998 when, under a House of Lords amendment to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, proposed by Lord Archer of Sandwell, the death penalty was abolished for treason and piracy with violence, replacing it with a discretionary maximum
Treason in the Republic of Ireland generally, but retained it for treason and several other crimes. The Criminal Justice Act 1990 abolished the death penalty completely and set the punishment for treason at life imprisonment, with parole in not less than forty years. The 1996 report of the Constitution Review Group considered the case for removing or altering the definition of treason in Article 39, and recommended no change. In 2010, in the context of the Irish financial crisis, the Green Party introduced a private member's bill to define the crime of "economic treason" in the Constitution. Treason in the Republic of Ireland The crime of