A world shift from execution
Since 1990, 108 nations have abolished the death penalty or suspended executions.
As Timothy McVeigh's execution, now scheduled for Monday, reignites emotional arguments about the value and morality of the death penalty, the world is no less divided than Americans over this vexed question.
But the terms of the debate are changing.
In the European Union - capital punishment-free zone - abolitionists no longer argue about whether executions deter crime. Now, campaigners are going global with a moral crusade, arguing that the death penalty violates a basic human right to life. And they're gaining converts. This month, Chile will join 108 other nations in the past decade that have struck capital punishment from their statutes, or declared a moratorium on executions.
A new Monitor/TIPP poll shows that in the US, No. 3 in executions worldwide, public support has slipped lately.
As in the US, public support fluctuates but in many countries polls show that the death penalty remains popular as the ultimate criminal deterrent. China leads the way as a practitioner of capital punishment.
But outside of the US and China, political leaders are increasingly rejecting such punishment on ethical grounds.
"In the modern conscience, the death penalty is not an internal matter of justice, but part of human rights, of general concern," says Mario Marazziti, an Italian activist who last December handed United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan 3 million signatures on an international petition calling for a worldwide moratorium on executions.
None of the 15 members of the European Union allow capital punishment, and the 41-member Council of Europe does not accept new members until they abolish the practice, which has led a number of East European countries to strike it from their lawbooks, as Ukraine did in May.
This week, the council's human rights committee recommended stripping the US and Japan of their observer status in the organization, unless both agree to cease executions and repeal the death penalty.
The EU, in addition, has adopted an activist stance against the death penalty: Its ambassador to Washington regularly presents letters of protest to governors of US states where prisoners are executed, and the EU is one of the sponsors of the first World Congress against the Death Penalty, to be held this month in Strasbourg, France.
Issue of 'moral leadership'
The issue is a major bone of contention. As former US ambassador Felix Rohatyn left Paris earlier this year, he wrote in the Washington Post that "during my nearly four years in France, no single issue evoked as much passion and as much protest as executions in the United States." America's "moral leadership is under challenge," he warned.
Since 1990, more than 30 countries in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe have abolished capital punishment for all crimes, according to the human rights watchdog Amnesty International.
Eighty-seven countries retain the death penalty and use it. Nearly 90 percent of the 1,457 executions last year took place in just four countries: China, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Iran.
In China, the courts hand down more death sentences a year than all other countries in the world combined. And the follow-through is rapid. Since April 11, an estimated 1,000 people have been put to death in a national "Strike Hard" campaign designed to deter crime and corruption in a nation where such lawlessness is seen as a political threat to the ruling government.
And in Southeast Asia, executions are on the rise as governments apply the death penalty to drug smugglers as well as to murderers. In April, the National Assembly of Laos amended the capital punishment law to make drug trafficking and drug possession offenses punishable by death.
At the other end of the spectrum, in Western Europe, nobody has been executed since 1977 and no political parties other than a few fringe groups on the extreme right are suggesting that the death penalty should be reinstated.
