e death penalty nor international laws.
In the 1950s, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) was drafted, an era when “capital punishment was not generally seen as a human rights violation…this attitude is changing. In the last decade a growing number of states have ended capital punishment under their national laws and are using and interpreting international law as an instrument to restrict its use and abolish it as a penalty” (Grant 19). Thus, we can see that unlike the United States, many international states have either abolished or are attempting to restrict the use of capital punishment. This is largely because a majority of these states view the death penalty as a human rights violation.
In fact, the U.S. increasingly comes under criticism from international bodies such as the U.N. because, in the same decade, it has moved in the opposite direction with respect to the death penalty. In that time the U.S. has expanded its scope of death penalty laws on both the national and state level. It has also decreased challenges from inmates awaiting execution and continues to carry out their execution. Internationally, imposing the death penalty is something that should be internationally protected as a human right. However, the U.S. has increasingly clashed with international bodies and states over its refusal to change its perspective on the use of the death penalty. The following are exemplary of the kind of international dissension the U.S. position on the use of the death penalty ar
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