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U.S. death penalty stance at odds with its trade partners
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One week from now, on November 10th, 2009, John Allen Muhammad, the leader of the “Beltway Snipers” who terrorized the D.C. Metropolitan area with a string of 15 sniper attacks in 2002, will be put to death in Virginia. Muhammed and his young accomplice, Lee Malvo, drove around in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington D.C. and shot people at random. Certainly, it is hard to argue that Muhammed does not deserve the sentence he was given, but continuing to use the death penalty puts the United States at odds with most of the free world.
It is a sign of the decreasing popularity of the death penalty around the world that, according to data collected by Amnesty International, 139 countries now either ban the death penalty outright or use it so rarely that they are considered to have de facto bans. There is growing international consensus that the death penalty is a violation of human rights. In fact, the only countries that had more judicially sanctioned executions than the United States in 2008 were China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, none of which are countries that the United States generally considers to be close peers in a human rights context.
This worldwide animosity towards the death penalty even manifests itself in the arena of international trade, and nowhere is this animosity more plainly present than in the European Union. In 2005 the European Commission passed a resolution banning trade in products used for capital punishment and torture. Some of the types of products that the ban encompasses are gallows and guillotines, electric chairs, airtight vaults “designed for the purpose of execution of human beings by the administration of a lethal gas or substance”, and automatic drug injection systems “designed for the purpose of execution of human beings by the administration of a lethal chemical substance”.
To be fair, it’s improbable that this European ban has had much of a noticable effect on international trade. There really aren't too many companies that specialize in exporting guillotines and gallows these days. Still, the fact that the Europeans feel strongly enough about the death penalty to ban trade in products that facilitate it speaks volumes on its own, and the fact that the death penalty is placed side-by-side with torture is also indicative of a growing international sentiment that the death penalty is inconsistent with general notions of human rights. Without a doubt, it is also clear that the vast majority of America’s trading partners have banned the practice and consider it abhorrent.
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