Human Rights

Additional Resources

Articles and Other Publications

  • Matthew D. Mathias, The Sacralization of the Individual: Human Rights and the Abolition of the Death Penalty, American Journal of Sociology, March 2013.
    • This arti­cle explores the fac­tors that caused many coun­tries to abol­ish the death penal­ty in the lat­ter half of the 20th cen­tu­ry. Unlike oth­er analy­ses, this arti­cle looks at cul­tur­al fac­tors that led to this trend, find­ing a strong link between reli­gion and the abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty, espe­cial­ly in pre­dom­i­nant­ly Catholic coun­tries and pre­dom­i­nant­ly Muslim countries. 
  • Anthony N. Bishop, The Death Penalty in the United States: An International Human Rights Perspective, Texas Law Review, 2001 – 2002.
    • The US open­ly declares its com­mit­ment to inter­na­tion­al human rights and crit­i­cizes oth­er coun­tries when they vio­late them while retain­ing the death penal­ty, which does not abide by inter­na­tion­al norms. This has led to con­se­quences for the US, with some coun­tries notably refus­ing to extra­dite ter­ror­ists if the US declared its inten­tion to seek the death penal­ty for them. The paper rais­es an inter­na­tion­al law argu­ment against the use of the death penal­ty in the US.
  • Allmand et al., Human Rights and Human Wrongs: Is the United States Death Penalty System Inconsistent with International Human Rights Law, Fordham Law Review, 1999.
    • Six legal schol­ars with exper­tise in cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment share their per­spec­tive on the U.S. death penal­ty sys­tem and inter­na­tion­al human rights law.
  • Christina M. Cerna, Universality of Human Rights: The Case of the Death Penalty, ILSA Journal of International Comparative Law, 1997.
    • This arti­cle exam­ines how the death penal­ty fits into the con­cept of the uni­ver­sal­i­ty of human rights.

Related Websites

See Amnesty International for year­ly glob­al reports on the death penalty. 

See Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights for more infor­ma­tion on human rights from vic­tims’ perspective.

Center for Constitutional Rights — The Death Penalty is a Human Rights Violation: An Examination of the Death Penalty in the U.S. from a Human Rights Perspective.