December 20, 2007
NYT Editorial
A Pause From Death
The United Nations General
Assembly voted on Tuesday for a global moratorium on the death penalty.
The resolution was nonbinding; its symbolic weight made barely a ripple
in the news ocean of the United States, where governments’ right to
kill a killer is enshrined in law and custom.
But for those who have been trying to move the world away from
lethal revenge as government policy, this was a milestone. The
resolution failed repeatedly in the 1990s, but this time the vote was
104 to 54, with 29 nations abstaining. Progress has come in Europe and
Africa. Nations like Senegal, Burundi, Gabon — even Rwanda, shamed by
genocide — have decided to reject the death penalty, as official
barbarism.
The United States, as usual, lined up on the other side, with Iran,
China, Pakistan, Sudan and Iraq. Together this blood brotherhood
accounts for more than 90 percent of the world’s executions, according
to Amnesty International. These countries’ devotion to their
sovereignty is rigid, as is their perverse faith in execution as a
criminal deterrent and an instrument of civilized justice. But out
beyond Texas, Ohio, Virginia, Myanmar, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and
Zimbabwe, there are growing numbers who expect better of humanity.
Many are not nations or states but groups of regular people,
organizations like the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay Catholic
movement begun in Italy whose advocacy did much to bring about this
week’s successful vote in the General Assembly.
They are motivated by hope — and there is even some in the United
States. The Supreme Court will soon hear debate on the cruelty of
execution by lethal injection. On Monday, New Jersey became the first
state in 40 years to abolish its death penalty.
That event, too, left much of this country underwhelmed. But
overseas, the votes in Trenton and the United Nations were treated as
glorious news. Rome continued a tradition to mark victories against
capital punishment: it bathed the Colosseum, where Christians once were
fed to lions, in golden light.