Transcript
Anne Holsinger 00:01
Hello, and welcome to 12:01: The Death Penalty in Context. I’m Anne Holsinger, Managing Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. In this episode, I’ll be speaking with Amy Bergquist, Associate Program Director at the Advocates for Human Rights, an organization dedicated to implementing international human rights standards to promote civil society and reinforce the rule of law. Ms. Bergquist is also a member of the Steering Committee of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. We’re recording this podcast to coincide with World Day Against the Death Penalty on October 10th, a commemoration Ms. Bergquist has been active in promoting. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Amy Bergquist 00:39
Happy to be here.
Anne Holsinger 00:40
Could you start by telling our listeners about the Advocates for Human Rights and the work you do there?
Amy Bergquist 00:45
Sure. The Advocates for Human Rights is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We were established in 1983 by a group of lawyers who were curious about all the things that were going on around the world and wondered what they could do from their home base to try to make the world a better place. So, they started the Advocates for Human Rights and now here we are and we have a staff of about 40 people, and we are a volunteer-based organization. So, most of our work is done with the help of volunteers. A lot of them are pro bono attorneys who help us with various things, and we work in partnership. That’s a really important part of our model, including for our death penalty work. We try to work in partnership with organizations that want our help in doing the work that they are doing. So, we help them, we help amplify their voices and bring their voices to the United Nations, for example. But there are a lot of different things the Advocates does. Most of them are not related directly to the death penalty. Most of our staff are involved with promoting and protecting the rights of migrants here in the United States. So, helping them seek asylum, gain other protections under U.S. immigration law. We also have a women’s human rights program. And so, the death penalty is really just me of the 40 or so staff, but it’s a really important part of the work that we do at the Advocates. Decades ago, we took a position being opposed to the death penalty under all circumstances. And the work that I do is directly connected with that.
Anne Holsinger 02:19
How did you become interested in international human rights and advocacy against the death penalty specifically?
Amy Bergquist 02:25
I’ve been interested in human rights for a very long time. And I started my career as a high school teacher. And I started at my high school, we started receiving a lot of recently arrived refugees, mainly from East Africa and I learned about their, the human rights violations that prompted them to leave their home countries. And I had always been interested in law and wondered what I could do to help address the human rights violations that caused them to flee and to make the world a better place. So, I went to law school with a view to doing human rights law. And I was really fortunate to land a position here at the Advocates for Human Rights to be able to do that work. With respect to the death penalty specifically, it was always something I was aware of, but not directly aware of, because Minnesota hasn’t had the death penalty for more than 100 years. So, it’s the sort of thing that in our state doesn’t come up a whole lot. But I became more and more aware of it on the international arena. And because I was developing my skills in international human rights advocacy, and because of the advocates role on the steering committee of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, that’s really when I started to dive into the work and really become immersed in abolition work around the world.
Anne Holsinger 03:38
So, as you mentioned, Minnesota is not a death penalty state. But the United States, of course, is a retentionist country, which creates an odd situation where despite its place as an economic and political leader on many issues, it’s an outlier in continuing to use the death penalty. How do you think that status affects the United States’ place on the international stage and the way that it interacts with international organizations?
Amy Bergquist 04:03
Well, first, I’ll talk about it on a personal level, but in some ways, it actually helps the advocate’s credibility that we are from a retentionist state. So, when we’re partnering with other members of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty that are in states that retain the death penalty, we have something in common. We understand those common struggles. But going back to your question about the United States’ place on the international stage, there’s really a broader issue here that’s emerged since January of 2025. The United States has really withdrawn from the human rights bodies at the United Nations, starting with the day after inauguration in January 2025. And so, it used to be, even under the first Trump administration, that our administration would comment on the human rights practices and policies of other countries around the world. And that stopped immediately in January 2025. So, because the United States is not even taking the microphone, not even occupying a chair in the room, we can’t use the UN bodies to try to pressure other governments and other organizations. So, where this is most dramatic in January of last year was with Iran. It just so happened that that first week of inauguration, the UN was reviewing Iran’s human rights record. And ordinarily, the United States would take the floor and would speak out about the human rights abuses in Iran. Even the current Trump administration has tried to call on human rights and the suppression of protesters in Iran as one of the one of the many justifications for the war in Iran. But we really lack credibility when we refuse to take up opportunities to speak out. And so, we lack credibility because we retain the death penalty, but also more broadly, we lack the credibility to engage with these international organizations like the United Nations, because we aren’t taking a seat at the table, even when we could.
Anne Holsinger 05:57
You mentioned the connection between Advocates for Human Rights and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The World Coalition has worked in conjunction with a French organization called ECPM, which is Together Against the Death Penalty in English. Could you discuss the event that they put on every three years, the World Congress Against the Death Penalty, and how that shapes the global perspective on the death penalty?
Amy Bergquist 06:21
Yes. The most recent World Congress Against the Death Penalty took place in late June, early July of this year. And as you said, it happens every three years, and it happens in different cities around the world. And there are really two tracks to it. The one track is the more diplomatic track, where they invite ministers of justice and other high-level officials from governments to come and take the stage and speak in an international arena. And sometimes this is a chance for governments to go on the record and make promises in front of other governments about things they’re going to do. So this year we saw, for example, Sierra Leone, which had abolished the death penalty a couple of years ago, promise in that forum to ratify the international treaty that has to do with abolition of the death penalty. We also saw Lebanon promise that it was going to abolish the death penalty. And it has. So, it’s a way to get governments on the record to make commitments and gives us a chance to follow through with those commitments. It was also really interesting because Morocco, which still has the death penalty on the books at the World Congress, said that it was going to host the next World Congress in three years. And that’s a really good signal that Morocco is ready to make some international commitments about abolition of the death penalty. So, we’re really excited to see that. But in addition to the diplomatic track, the World Congress Against the Death Penalty has what I would call the civil society track. So, it’s a chance for civil society organizations from around the world to gather, to share good practices, to have workshops, to strategize. And it’s really a vibrant sort of environment for organizations like the Advocates for Human Rights and all of the 180 plus members of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty to get together, to learn from each other, and to strategize. So, it’s a really exciting opportunity for the whole abolitionist community to come together.
Anne Holsinger 08:16
This year, one of the themes of the World Congress was youth activism. What do you see as the role of young people in efforts to abolish the death penalty?
Amy Bergquist 08:25
We are really trying to tap into all of the energy, enthusiasm, and expertise of youth. It’s something that is often for from the perspective of a person like me who is a lawyer, we don’t necessarily have the skills to reach out to the general public to make TikTok videos and things like that. And there are young people who are really enthusiastic about using their skills to work toward abolition of the death penalty. And they are teaching us how it’s done, how to frame things, how to reach an audience, how to change our messaging so that we’re connecting not just with the older guard, but connecting with people who don’t really give the death penalty a lot of thought. So, it was really exciting to attend some of those workshops and to have those connections with younger people who take a different perspective in advocacy. And it really is a changing world in terms of how we reach out to the general public, how we connect with people, and they’re instrumental. We’ve also seen a lot of World Coalition members do really strategic things to engage youth. I want to point out that there’s an anti-death penalty Asia network that is organizing a workshop in November 2026 alongside the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty and the focus of the workshop is building a solidarity network of youth against the death penalty. And they’re having this workshop in Manila in the Philippines later this year. So, there’s some really good strategies for being inclusive and letting youth take the lead in abolition work.
Anne Holsinger 09:59
What sorts of events and actions are taking place this year around World Day Against the Death Penalty? And why do you think it’s important to have a day dedicated to this issue each year?
Amy Bergquist 10:09
Every World Day has a particular theme. And I think it’s really helpful to have a theme because it gives World Day focus, a sort of thing that people can center their advocacy around. So, the theme for the previous two years was that the death penalty protects no one. It gave people a chance to focus on what the death penalty does and does not do, to attack that debunked myth of deterrence. And so, it really helped focus people’s attention. I’m really excited that the theme for this year and for 2027 is storytelling — it’s stories for life. And this is, again, going back to your question about youth, storytelling is really a way to communicate with people and to mobilize people to change. And what we’re doing through this theme for World Day is encouraging members to brush up their skills on how to do storytelling for advocacy and to highlight stories, especially stories of people with lived experience, people who have directly experienced the death penalty, whether themselves being sentenced to death, whether it’s a loved one, whether they themselves were an executioner or a family member of a victim. It’s really important to bring those stories to life because those stories can help connect with people in the way that facts and figures and legal arguments can’t. So, there are a bunch of events that have been organized all around the world for World Day Against the Death Penalty and if your listeners are interested, the two hashtags that we’re using for World Day Against the Death Penalty are ‘Abolition Now’ and ‘No Death Penalty.’ So, you can go on your favorite social media channel and search for activities and social media campaigns. But just to give you a sampling, there’s an organization called Women Beyond Walls that has created a series of short films about women on death row. They’re having a screening in London, followed by a panel discussion. There are World Coalition members in Israel and Palestine who are doing a briefing on Israel’s new death penalty law that applies to Palestinians. There are countries at the United Nations in New York that are holding a, what they call a side event at the UN General Assembly to promote the success stories of countries that have abolished the death penalty. So, diplomats from Lebanon, Mongolia, and Sierra Leone will be speaking at that side event. We had an event organized by Parliamentarians for Global Action that focused on members of parliament in the Americas and progress that they’ve made toward abolishing the death penalty in the Western Hemisphere. Our partners at the Justice Project Pakistan are organizing a seminar on capital punishment and Islam. There’s also, you know, here in the United States, in Columbus, Ohio, the Ohio Coalition for Abolishing the Death Penalty is organizing a walk. There’s a peaceful protest in Raleigh, North Carolina, but there’s also going to be an event in Melbourne, Australia. And I really want to highlight that the types of activities are really diverse, and I want to amplify what people are doing in Iran. Iran is one of the world’s leading executioners, and for the past almost three years, people in prisons throughout Iran have staged a campaign called No to Executions Tuesdays. So just this past Tuesday, they had their latest campaign, and this one was in commemoration of World Day Against the Death Penalty. So, they do this protest, and this time they issued a statement, which is really quite bold for the level of repression there is in Iran. Iran had executed 22 people in the previous week, and these people living in prison issued a statement condemning the government of Iran. So, it’s really exciting to see all the different activities around the world. In previous years, we’ve had coalition members organize film screenings, escape rooms, all sorts of really creative activities to try to raise awareness about death penalty issues, to gather support and followers, and to build momentum for abolition.
Anne Holsinger 14:11
I’m glad you mentioned Iran, because I wanted to ask a little bit about the increase in executions that we’re seeing globally, and a lot of that is driven by just a handful of countries, including Iran. According to Amnesty International, there were 2,707 executions in 2025, which was a 78% increase from the year before. How does your organization respond to this increase in executions, and what efforts are in place to spread awareness about it globally?
Amy Bergquist 14:38
It is concerning that there has been an increase in executions, but as you suggest, and it was largely attributable to Iran, which had a spike in executions, and a lot of that has to do with the political situation in the country and the way the government has been cracking down more recently. So, we shouldn’t take what Iran is doing as a symptom of what’s happening worldwide. Certainly, we have had an increase in executions in the United States, as well. So, I don’t want to discount that, but it’s important to keep pushing for abolition and to raise awareness about the increase in executions. We know that the UN General Assembly is going to adopt a resolution later this year that’s going to mention this increase in executions and express concern about it. So, it’s really important on the international arena to acknowledge that this is happening and to push back. So that’s really an ongoing theme for the international community and for civil society organizations is we are not going to give up. We’re going to keep pushing back. We’re going to use the different tools that we have in our advocacy toolkit, and we’re going to make noise about it. So, it’s really important to document to get the actual numbers. But it’s also important to highlight what’s going on and say this isn’t okay.
Anne Holsinger 15:55
What is currently changing about the international perception of the death penalty?
Amy Bergquist 16:00
I’d say that more and more the countries that retain the death penalty are outliers and that positive pressure is actually having a positive effect. We’ve seen recently countries like Zambia and Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone and now Lebanon abolishing the death penalty. But even countries like Malaysia that still have the death penalty have really cut back on their use of the death penalty. And we even see countries like Malaysia trying to exert influence on their neighbors, like Singapore, to be more restrained in their use of the death penalty. And I think there’s more and more recognition on the international sphere of moratoriums or moratoria as a positive step in the pathway toward abolition. I also think we’re seeing less and less reliance on the debunked arguments about deterrence and things like that. I also think we’re seeing on the international level more awareness of the gender dimension of the death penalty. Even though there are relatively few women under sentence of death and women being executed, the gender component of those cases and the histories of gender-based violence, for example, that those women have experienced is further evidence of how the death penalty is arbitrary. So I think we’ve seen that with the failed execution of Christa Pike. There’s a lot of attention now to her childhood, to her history of being subjected to gender-based violence, even as a toddler. And that now that we, when we amplify and highlight the experiences of those women, we can see that this is not a penalty that’s being reserved for the worst of the worst. It’s really one that is discriminatory against women who have these histories of gender-based violence. I also think there’s, on the international sphere at least, sort of issues that are crystallizing. There’s more and more of a consensus worldwide on what is and what isn’t a most serious crime. Under international human rights standards, countries are supposed to reserve the death penalty, if they have the death penalty, for the most serious crimes. And UN bodies have clarified that by most serious, we mean intentional homicide. So, first-degree murder. There are countries that still have the death penalty, and this is driving the spike in executions, for things like drug-related offenses. And there’s more and more of an evidence that drug-related offenses that don’t result in anyone dying are not among the most serious crimes. So, the more we can build consensus on that point, the more we can pressure countries like Iran and Singapore that primarily execute people for drug-related crimes, that that’s not acceptable. That even if they’re going to retain the death penalty, they need to curtail it and limit it to the most serious crimes. There’s also a really exciting, growing consensus on the connection between torture and the death penalty. The UN expert on executions issued a report in April of this year, and he was focusing, he did a lot of research, he came to the United States and talked to death row exonerees and talked to other people about the connection between torture and the death penalty. And this has been an issue that was sort of up for debate internationally, but this report that he issued really seemed to solidify what civil society has been arguing for quite some time: that the death penalty and torture are inextricably interlinked. And so, I just want to read what his main conclusion was, because it was really exciting to see this imprint at such a high level. He said that under contemporary international law, and in light of current medical and psychological understanding of torture and its effects, the death penalty cannot be reconciled with the absolute prohibition of torture and the duty to protect human dignity. So, it was really meaningful to see that movement and those powerful words from the UN expert on executions.
Anne Holsinger 20:04
Given all of that context, what do you think the future of the death penalty looks like?
Amy Bergquist 20:08
We say this about a lot of human rights issues at work, but the fight to abolish the death penalty around the world really is a marathon, not a sprint. And here in the United States right now, it feels like we’re running that marathon and we’re on a really steep uphill segment and we cannot see the finish line. But slowly but surely, we’re chipping away at it. We’re making incremental change, we’re engaging in strategic advocacy, and we’re celebrating each win. And I think sometimes when things go horribly wrong, like the torture of Christa Pike in Tennessee, that really highlights and raises awareness among people who wouldn’t normally think about the death penalty, that this is a system that’s fundamentally broken, and that we need to do something to get rid of it. So, I really think that it’s a matter of looking at the long game and doing what we can in our day-to-day advocacy. I’ll give you an example. When we work with the World Coalition partners around the world on advocacy of the United Nations, we talk to them, we say, okay, of course we want your country to abolish the death penalty, but what is some incremental change that we could advocate for that would really help move the ball forward, even if it doesn’t mean abolition of the death penalty? So, we’ve had countries that still have the death penalty agree not to abolish the death penalty but agree to raise awareness among the public about human rights issues related to the death penalty, or to limit the death penalty to the most serious crimes. So that means that even if a country isn’t abolishing the death penalty, they’re agreeing to take these smaller steps, and those smaller steps put one in front of the other will ultimately lead all countries to abolishing the death penalty. So as long as we’re moving in the right direction, even if the road seems steep, we will get there.
Anne Holsinger 22:01
Is there anything else you’d like to share with our listeners?
Amy Bergquist 22:04
Well, I really want to thank the Death Penalty Information Center for all of its excellent work. We have had the chance in doing our advocacy with the United Nations to highlight some of the great research the Death Penalty Information Center does, and that information has been highlighted, for example, in the report that I mentioned from the Special Rapporteur on Executions. So, we’re really, really grateful to all of the great work that you do as being a clearinghouse for information about the death penalty in the United States. It’s a tremendous resource, and it’s really an honor to be able to speak to you for your podcast.
Anne Holsinger 22:41
Thank you so much. We really appreciate the work that you’re doing and you sharing your expertise with us. You know, since our focus is fairly narrowly centered on the United States, it’s always really valuable to hear about what’s going on in the rest of the world.
Amy Bergquist 22:56
Happy to talk to you.
Anne Holsinger 22:57
Our listeners can find out more about The Advocates for Human Rights at www.theadvocatesforhumanrights.org, and about the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty at www.worldcoalition.org. To learn more about the death penalty across the U.S., you can visit DPI’s website at www.deathpenaltyinfo.org. And to support the 1201 podcast and all of DPI’s work, please visit www.deathpenaltyinfo.org. To make sure you never miss an episode, subscribe to 1201 in your podcast app of choice.
