The Foreign Service Journal, October 2003

ilar rule will apply against two Australian citizens who have also been held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, awaiting military tribunals. A More Cohesive Opposition Clearly, the world is more interconnected than ever before. Interests of trade, the promotion of human rights, fighting terrorism, and international develop- ment, all require greater cooperation among countries. The U.S. is keenly aware of these new realities and has sought allies for its military interventions in Kuwait, Afghanistan and Iraq. The U.S. concern was also demonstrated by its angry reaction to being excluded from the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 2001 (though it has now regained its seat). The U.S. is facing a further embarrassment if it loses its observer status in the Council of Europe, which has been directly tied to movement on the death penalty issue. In the long run, the reason why international opposi- tion to the death penalty may finally be having a signif- icant impact on the U.S. is that this opposition is more cohesive than ever before. The United States’ closest allies in Europe and North America are unanimous in rejecting the death penalty and they do not hesitate to let their views be known. New countries can only be admitted to the growing European Union, a body whose size and economy may soon equal or surpass the U.S., if they renounce the death penalty. Courts in countries such as Canada and Mexico, and throughout Europe, have begun to consistently refuse extradition as long as the death penalty is a possibility in the U.S. And, on the issue of the execution of juvenile offenders, every coun- try of the world, with the possible exception of Somalia, has ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child forbidding such executions. In the face of such consis- tent and adamant challenges to the death penalty, the U.S. risks becoming isolated at a time when it can least afford it. There are increasing signs that giving way on the death penalty would not be the major concession it would have been in the past. Doubts about the accura- cy and fairness of the death penalty have increased dra- matically in the U.S. as scores of inmates have been freed from death row. Support for life-without-parole sentences has increased, and the number of death sen- tences in the U.S. has plummeted by 50 percent in recent years. The only contrary trend is a more aggres- sive use of the federal death penalty by the present administration. But even there, the results reflect a growing ambivalence about this ultimate sentence: 20 of the last 21 federal capital prosecutions have resulted in sentences of less than death. International concerns about the death penalty would probably never be enough alone to make the U.S. abandon this practice. But capital punishment is unlikely to be undone for any one reason. Like snow on a branch, it is not any single flake that makes the branch break, but rather the collective weight of many flakes accumulating over time. Because international con- cerns are generally being given more recognition in the U.S., because various aspects of the U.S. death penalty are forcibly intersecting with the citizens and principles of other countries, and because the opinion of those other countries is more unified than ever before, it is likely that the death penalty will come under increasing criticism both here and abroad, and its use will contin- ue to decline. ■ F O C U S 38 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 3