Death penalty as a new stake in international relations
Death penalty became recently an important issue for international relations, and no more a purely domestic matter, as it used to be. On the one hand, legal obligations were determined in the fields of human rights – the right to live, prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment – as in procedural matters, with a case-law of international jurisdictions, from the International Court of Justice to the European Court of Human Rights. On the other hand, international standards were set within the UN soft law or the news forms of parliamentary diplomacy. These various trends are the starting line of the international campaign of the European countries and the NGOs for a universal abolition of capital punishment. – Summary AFRI-2002
