Webinar Series on Human Rights and the U.S. Death Penalty
In 2022, DPIC hosted a series of webinars on topics related to human rights in the U.S. death penalty
DPIC Analysis—At Least 1,300 Prisoners are on U.S. Death Rows in Violation of U.S. Human Rights Obligations
Half of U.S. death row has been imprisoned 20 years or more, in violation of international human rights agreements
Overview
International human rights treaties declare that “Every human being has the inherent right to life.” This right, set forth in Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), adopted by the United Nations (UN) in 1966, further provides that “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.” Article 6 further states that “In countries which have not abolished the death penalty, sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes in accordance with the law in force at the time of the commission of the crime.” The ICCPR prohibits the use of the death penalty “for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age” and bars the execution of women while they are pregnant. Article 7 of the ICCPR declares that “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”
When the United States ratified the ICCPR in 1992, it did so with specific reservations relating to the use of the death penalty. First, it “reserve[d] the right, subject to its Constitutional constraints, to impose capital punishment on any person (other than a pregnant woman) duly convicted under existing or future laws permitting the imposition of capital punishment, including such punishment for crimes committed by persons below eighteen years of age.” Second, it stated that “the United States considers itself bound by article 7 to the extent that `cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment’ means the cruel and unusual treatment or punishment prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and/or Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States.” It further declared that the treaty’s provisions “are not self-executing,” meaning that they are not enforceable under U.S. domestic law without enabling legislation by Congress.
The ICCPR establishes the end of the death penalty as a human rights goal, declaring that “Nothing in [Article 6] shall be invoked to delay or to prevent the abolition of capital punishment by any State Party to the present Covenant.” This goal was codified in the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty, which was promulgated on December 15, 1989. As of December 2022, ninety nations were parties to the optional protocol.
Article IV of the American Convention on Human Rights expands upon the right to life recognized in the ICCPR, providing that the death penalty “shall not be extended to crimes to which it does not presently apply” and “shall not be re-established in states that have abolished it.” It also provides that capital punishment shall not be imposed upon individuals who were age 70 or older at the time of the offense, or while a petition seeking clemency is pending decision. The United States is not a party to the American Convention.
Some of the other international human rights treaties that have an impact on the administration of capital punishment in the U.S. are: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, and the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (the Nelson Mandela Rules).
At Issue
Globally, the death penalty is typically examined through a human rights framework, but the U.S. generally views the issue through a criminal legal lens. Annual UN reports on the use of capital punishment worldwide regularly focus on the ways in which the administration of the death penalty violate fundamental human rights, including the denial of due process, racial discrimination, secrecy, and inhumane conditions of confinement and methods of execution. The European Union has repeatedly stated its opposition in all circumstances to capital punishment as an inherent violation of the human right to life, as has Pope Francis on behalf of the worldwide Catholic Church. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also stated their universal opposition to the death penalty.
This discrepancy between international and domestic discourse is reflected in the a lack of emphasis on human rights in the U.S.. In August 2022, UN Committee Expert and Country Rapporteur Faith Dikeledi Pansy Tlakula, on behalf of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, “expressed concern at the lack of an institutionalised coordinating mechanism such as a national human rights institution” in the U.S.
In 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty with a view to abolition. In each of the eight General Assembly biennial sessions since, the UN has approved new versions of this resolution, with its December 15, 2022 vote receiving 125 votes in favor, 37 against, and 22 abstentions. The United States, along with Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China, and Vietnam, voted no. A memorandum explaining the U.S. vote asserted that “judicial enforcement of the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ensures substantive due process that applies at both the federal and state levels and prohibits methods of execution that would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.”
A July 2022 report of the UN Secretary-General on the Question of the Death Penalty noted that “170 States have abolished or introduced a moratorium on the death penalty either in law or in practice, or have suspended executions for more than 10 years.” Abolition of the death penalty is a prerequisite for membership in the European Union and the U.S. remains an outlier as one of the only western democracies to retain capital punishment.
The U.S. rarely ratifies international human rights instruments and when it does, it typically declares them non-self-executing and includes reservations exempting itself from certain provisions. The five ratifications of human rights treaties by the U.S. are notably fewer than the numbers ratified by its neighbors, Canada (13) and Mexico (16), and its allies in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.
What DPIC Offers
In 2022, DPIC undertook a new project on Human Rights and the U.S. Death Penalty that featured a series of events and activities undertaken with the support of the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany. The events included a live presentations on human rights and the death penalty in Berlin and at the Germany Embassy in Washington, D.C., a webinar series examining various policy issues relating to the U.S. administration and use of the death penalty, the recording of a podcast viewing racial issues in the administration of the U.S. death penalty through a human rights lens, and the first of DPIC’s human rights webpages. The webinars examined Race, Human Rights, and the U.S. Death Penalty; Human Rights, Excessive Punishment, and Conditions of Death-Row Confinement in the U.S., and Secrecy, Execution Methods, & the International Response.
DPIC provides webpages on Foreign Nationals on U.S. Death Row, including violations of U.S. human rights obligations to provide capitally charged defendants notice of their right to consular assistance and on major reports on human rights issues in the death penalty worldwide. These include Amnesty International’s annual reports on global use of the death penalty, Harm Reduction International’s reports on the use of the death penalty for non-violent drug offenses in violation of international law, and the Cornell Center for the Death Penalty Worldwide’s report on the application of the death penalty against women. DPIC also offers human rights analysis of the confinement of prisoners on death rows across the U.S., documenting more than 1,500 violations of U.S. human rights obligations.
DPIC would like to especially thank our former Executive Director, Robert Dunham, for his inspiration in envisioning and developing this human rights project.
We would also like to acknowledge the generous assistance from the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany for encouraging and supporting this focus on human rights and the death penalty.
News & Developments
News
Aug 16, 2023
Judge Orders Hearing for Idaho Prisoner Who Faced 5 Execution Dates, Claims of Repeated ‘Psychological Torture’
Idaho U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill has ruled in favor of death row prisoner Gerald Pizzuto, indefinitely pausing his March 2023 execution date, and granting him a hearing in his claim that the state of Idaho violates his Constitutional right against cruel and unusual punishment by repeatedly scheduling execution dates while knowing the state does not have the means to carry it out. “As Pizzuto describes it,” Judge Winmill wrote, “defendants’ repeated rescheduling of his execution is like dry firing in a mock execution or a game of Russian…
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Mar 12, 2024
Three Largest Nitrogen Gas Manufacturers in the U.S. Prohibit Products from Use in Executions
As more states consider nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, three of the largest manufacturers in the U.S. have barred their products intended for life-saving measures from use in executions.
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Mar 06, 2024
Worldwide Wednesday International Roundup: Afghanistan, China, Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United States, Vietnam, Yemen, and Zimbabwe
In the aftermath of Idaho’s failed execution of Thomas Creech and Texas’ execution of Ivan Cantu on February 28, the European Union released a statement expressing its regret and reiterating its unequivocal opposition to the death penalty.. “[The death penalty] is a violation of the right to life and fails to act as a deterrent to crime. It represents the ultimate punishment that makes miscarriages of justice irreversible,” said the statement. “[W]e are concerned by the fact that the number of executions in the US increased last year, as 24…
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Feb 07, 2024
Worldwide Wednesday International Roundup: China, Ghana, Iran, Japan, Saudi Arabia, United States, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe
The January 25, 2024 execution of Kenneth Smith in the state of Alabama with nitrogen gas received widespread international condemnation. The European Union reiterated its commitment to abolishing the death penalty and called the execution method a “particularly cruel and unusual punishment.” The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, stated: “I deeply regret the execution of Kenneth Eugene Smith in Alabama despite serious concerns that this novel and untested method of suffocation may amount to torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” A January 30 statement by four United…
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Jan 24, 2024
Worldwide Wednesday International Roundup: China, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Japan, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and Yemen
The University of Oxford Death Penalty Research Unit, in collaboration with several human rights nonprofits, recently launched a database of foreign nationals sentenced to death or executed from January 1, 2016 to December 31, 2021 in Asia and the Middle East. They found that Saudi Arabia leads the Middle East in sentencing foreign nationals to death (385 people) and drug-trafficking (283), closely followed by murder (257), are the top crimes for which foreign nationals in the region are capitally convicted. Among the foreign nationals sentenced to the death in the…
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Dec 08, 2023
Discussions with DPIC Podcast: Classifying Capital Punishment as Torture with John Bessler
In this month’s episode of Discussions with DPIC, Managing Director Anne Holsinger speaks with John Bessler (pictured), Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law. Professor Bessler is the author of several books on the death penalty, including his 2023 book The Death Penalty’s Denial of Fundamental Human Rights: International Law, State Practice, and the Emerging Abolitionist Norm. In his most recent book, Professor Bessler argues that the death penalty should be classified as torture, which would prohibit its use under international law and treaties. The reality…
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Dec 06, 2023
Worldwide Wednesday International Roundup: China, Israel, Iran, Malaysia, Philippines, Qatar, Somalia, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe
On November 7, Chinese media reported that former primary school principal Zhang Longji was executed via lethal injection for raping five girls, age 8 – 12, and sexually molesting 17 girls, age 8 – 14. Sun Deshun, former president of China CITIC Bank Corporation Limited, who was convicted of accepting $1 billion yuan ($137 million) in bribes, was given a suspended death sentence by the Intermediate People’s Court in Jinan on November 10. If no new crimes are committed during the two-year probation, then Mr. Sun’s sentence could be commuted to life without parole. According to…
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Nov 16, 2023
After “Due Process Disaster,” Texas Death Row Prisoner Whose Appeal Was Lost is Resentenced and Eligible for Parole
A death-sentenced prisoner whose appeal was lost for thirty years was resentenced to life with parole on November 14, 2023, when the Harris County, Texas District Attorney’s office said it is no longer pursuing the death penalty. Syed Rabbani, a Bangladeshi national, has been on death row since 1988 for a fatal Houston shooting. Mr. Rabbani filed his appeal in 1994, but it remained pending in the Harris County Court system until 2022, when the Harris County District Clerk’s Office rediscovered the filing among 100+ other ‘forgotten’ cases. Although severely…
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Oct 12, 2023
Worldwide Wednesday International Roundup: China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, and Vietnam
October 10, 2023 marked the 21st World Day Against the Death Penalty. Regarding this year’s theme, “The Death Penalty, an Irreversible Torture,” Raphaël Chenuil Hazan, executive director of France-based abolitionist group EPCM, said “Today, we no longer need to demonstrate to anyone that the death penalty is a sophisticated form of torture, both in the phase of sentencing or investigation (where physical and psychological torture is often used to obtain confessions), where the elements of a fair trial are often unfortunately not met, and during the psychologically unbearable wait for…
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Sep 28, 2023
Guantanamo Bay Judge Rules 9/11 Capital Defendant Mentally Incompetent to Stand Trial
On September 21, 2023, a military judge in Guantanamo Bay ruled that Ramzi Bin al Shibh, one of five defendants in the 9/11 case for whom the death penalty is being sought, is mentally incompetent to stand trial. Mr. Bin al Shibh, who has been detained for 21 years, will remain in custody at Guantanamo as authorities attempt to treat the post-traumatic stress disorder caused when he was forced to undergo “enhanced interrogations” by the U.S. government.
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Sep 06, 2023
Worldwide Wednesday International Roundup: China, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, and Vietnam
On August 4, a South Korean national convicted of drug-trafficking was executed in China, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who added during a press conference that this execution was “unrelated to the current bilateral relations” between the two nations. This was the first time a South Korean national was executed in China for drug-trafficking since 2014, when four were executed.
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