Capital Punishment And The Death Penalty: Basic Human Rights

Improved Essays
Capital punishment is a denial of the most basic human rights; it violates one of the most fundamental principles under widely accepted human rights law, in which that states must recognize the right to life. The UN General Assembly has called for an end to capital punishment and human rights organizations agree that it breaks fundamental human rights standards. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, under Article 3 life is said to be a human right. This makes the death penalty our most significant human rights violation. If governments have the right and power to extinguish lives, they also have the ability to deny access to every other right stated in the Declaration. This first most imperative right provides foundation to every other human right. The beginning and ending point for a human right based analysis must be that capital punishment is never steady with crucial human rights standards.
Besides denying the right to life, other basic rights are frequently breached in capital punishment’s application. The death penalty has been found to break the denial against cruel, inhumane, and degrading
…show more content…
This comprehension has prompted progress in the nullification of capital punishment around the world. 35 years ago, just 16 nations had put an end to capital punishment for all crimes, while today that number has grown to 104. In addition, of those that still have capital punishment in their law, 35 are abolitionist by practice and have not executed anybody in at least 10 years. In 2010, just 23 nations were known to have executions. Consistently, a large portion of the world 's executions occur in just a couple of nations, and the United States is among those countries. From 2007 to 2011, the United States executed 220 individuals. America’s frequency of executions is met only by Saudi Arabia, Yemen, North Korea, Iran, and

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    nobody deserves to die for committing crime by mistake or without conscious, so the main point for human rights examinations must be that the death penalty is disproportionate with fundamental human rights standards. "Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."(Martin Luther King). Capital punishment may have impact in expanding violence mentalities in a society which might increase the quantity of crimes rate in countries that practiced it.…

    • 178 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Igor Primoratz Analysis

    • 968 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The author is in agreement with death penalty and his defense of death penalty considers, "a life for a life". The author defends capital punishment against several objections, as follows: a right to life objection, a contradiction objection, lack of proportionality, an unpreventable error objection, and a bias and prejudice…

    • 968 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Different people judge situations in different ways. The world has become a place where greed and evil have taken power; the only way to save the world is with justice. Capital punishment and the killing of those rotten people is the only way to rid the world of evil. In the novel Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, justice had to be done, every crime has a punishment and every punishment assures justice. Therefore, capital punishment is a well needed and well deserved punishment.…

    • 632 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The concept of capital punishment, or as it’s better known as the death penalty, as an option within the judicial system has existed for centuries with mentions of such acts stemming all the way back to the bible. The act has had different variations changing throughout the course of time ranging from those as terrible as public centralized hanging or burning to those seemingly better such as lethal injection. Modern day demonstrations of the death penalty have been over-saturated more and more over the years effectively desensitizing the general public to the completion of such an act, the deliberate taking of another human being’s life, to be completely reasonable in its carrying out. With such early examples of the death penalty within…

    • 1042 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Since the creations of America, gigantic difference has surrounded the death sentence. Citizens question whether America’s methods of crucifixion are more tedious and brutal than the nation cares to comprehend. Some know, however, that the claims process that goes conjointly with death sentencing is ostensibly endless procedure that hardly ends in an actual death cost. Some even know that many culprits on death row easily die of old age before their precise day of crucifixion arrives. What many Americans avoid, though, is the number of culprits who die from incidents related to their arrest.…

    • 679 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Death Penalty Texas

    • 1001 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Not all the cases with death sentences is right, “I don't want to put one innocent person to death to put 99 that are guilty to death,” said Gary Johnson (Johnson 1). In addition, the cost of it is also excessively expensive; therefore, this solution is not as good as its definition. The death penalty has its impacts to the criminal behavior of people as the result of reducing crime rates since it was re-instituted. One can say keep it but only for a symbol. Life is precious, and no one has the right to end other’s…

    • 1001 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    More and more countries are turning away from using this, the most ultimate of punishment. In fact only 24 countries executed people in 2014 compared to 42 in 1995. It’s not merely countries choosing not to use it either, it has been enshrined in international treaties. This would appear to indicate that more and more people are finding the death penalty unacceptable, be it for moral or other reasons. In this essay I am going to argue that in certain situations capital punishment is morally defensible and explain why I think this.…

    • 1971 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Debate: Should America Have Capital Punishment? “For centuries the death penalty, often accompanied by barbarous refinements, has been trying to hold crime in check; yet crime persists. Why? Because the instincts that are warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium” (Camus). In America, capital punishment has been a growing issue; it continues to be in the news when a high profile case comes up, or when laws on capital punishment are argued in court.…

    • 784 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The death penalty has been a social justice issue for several years. As many may know, the death penalty is the act of killing individuals. Although the death penalty is only to be distributed under certain circumstances and reserved for the worst crimes, that is not always the case. The death penalty has now raised an argument as to whether or not capital punishment is appropriate in a modern cultured society and also to questions about the justice of the trials and the dependability of the results. The variety of capital offences an offender may be put to death for various reasons, but many cases have been inappropriately dependent on the race and gender of the defendant.…

    • 794 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Even though many countries abolished the death penalty from their law, there is still quite a few that still practices the act of killing a person convicted of a crime. People have numerous different opinions relating to the issue of the death penalty that is given to a convict. While some may think that the death penalty is necessary for those who have committed a terrible crime, there are others who consider it as an immoral act that goes against the values of humanity. According to the author William Wood, in his text “Capital Punishment/Death Penalty,” there are generally two arguments that suggest capital punishment is an effective way to save lives and deter numerous crimes. Also, it plays a major role in giving justice to victims.…

    • 1628 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    As John Morrison exclaimed,“It should be clear that the death penalty does just the opposite of promoting decency and respect for life... It can never be applied fairly.” Since the mid nineteenth century, inmates on death row have been murdered by a plethora of gruesome methods, such as venomous lethal injections, gas chambers, and electrocution. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there have been 1,413 executions in the United States from 1976 to the present. Although the number of death penalty verdicts are decreasing, flaws in the American judicial system have caused an increase in the amount of punishing wrongfully accused suspects to the death penalty.…

    • 1178 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The death penalty has been a solution to crimes constantly. Justice systems around the world have chosen to take the life of a criminal instead of sentencing them to life in prison. Capital punishment should be abolished because the justice system should not have the authority to take a criminal’s life. According to capital punishment laws, it is not justified for a criminal to take a life, but it is acceptable for a member of the justice system to take that criminal’s life.…

    • 1834 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The death penalty is otherwise known as capital punishment or execution, which means punishment by death. Most societies have used this type of punishment in the past decades for criminals. Historically the way they used to go about capital punishment would be by using torture and the executions would be public to society. As of 2015 there are 31 states with the death penalty and 19 states without the death penalty. The first death penalty laws were dated as far back as the eighteenth century B.C.…

    • 1739 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Death Penalty: The Price Society Pays The death penalty has been a topic of controversy for centuries, known for its inhumane brutality methods which have evolved over the years from lynching to gassing, electrocuting and now the lethal injection; it is in fact the sentencing of those who have committed a heinous crime. On the other hand, justice has been served when the death penalty has finally been executed on the prisoner, bringing a sense of retribution to those who have lost a loved one due to the crime committed. Although many people might think it is a working system, others land in the mixture of controversy for various reasons. Over the course of time, the death penalty has started to become obsolete and is slowly making a turnover…

    • 1158 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    This led to reform of capital punishment in the 1700s. In the 1800s most laws that allowed for capital punishment were abandoned, not only in Britain, but across most of Europe and the rest of the civilized world. Today, only a small number of developed countries remain to implement the practice of capital punishment. The ethical dilemmas that are faced when discussing capital punishment are many; What crime merits the punishment of death?…

    • 783 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays