Should the UN campaign against the death penalty?
Last night, I had the chance to hear the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay. She is extraordinarily impressive. As a private lawyer, she battled apartheid in her native South Africa. She has since served as a judge on South Africa’s High Court, on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and on the ...
Last night, I had the chance to hear the UN's high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay. She is extraordinarily impressive. As a private lawyer, she battled apartheid in her native South Africa. She has since served as a judge on South Africa's High Court, on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and on the International Criminal Court.
Last night, I had the chance to hear the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Navi Pillay. She is extraordinarily impressive. As a private lawyer, she battled apartheid in her native South Africa. She has since served as a judge on South Africa’s High Court, on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and on the International Criminal Court.
But in the course of her remarks to the American Bar Association, she included a jab at the United States for its continued use of the death penalty (she noted that her own South Africa has already banned the penalty). The comment was not the centerpiece of her remarks, but it did raise a question about appropriate human rights advocacy strategies for the world body. Specifically, it struck me as odd that the UN’s chief human rights official would chide a member state about a practice that international human rights law permits.
Via Twitter this morning, I had an exchange with several well informed UN and international law experts on the subject. Several folks confirmed my impression that while a biased or procedurally incorrect application of the death penalty would violate existing human rights law, the penalty itself does not. Plenty of states of course have done away with the death penalty, but international human rights treaties do not require that step.
If that is indeed the state of the law, Pillay’s comment begs the question of whether it’s appropriate for a United Nations official to be essentially advocating the expansion and modification of existing human rights law or whether that should be left to the treaty-making process. The line between enforcement of existing human rights standards and the creation of new ones is a blurry one of course. Major human rights organizations appear to be engaged in both projects simultaneously, often with little differentiation between the two.
That seems fine (although, to my mind, not ideal) for a nongovernmental organization. But is that blurring of the lines appropriate for UN officials?
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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