ABSTRACT: An important stage in the campaign for abolishing the death penalty throughout the world should be the formation of an international principle-consuetude banning legal executions. Such a norm would be binding and in accordance with international law, and take precedence over contrasting domestic law. To achieve this, a greater number of countries which benefit from prestige in the international community must ratify international agreements which ban or limit the death penalty. This would be proof of the existence of an international consuetude.

(THE PARTY new - n. 6 - march 1992)

The United States of America, the oldest and most solid of democracies, an obligatory reference point in the international community and government of the world, is an important if not decisive target of our campaign. Spurred on by its democratic and liberal tradition, but held back by the presumption of considering its constitution as the best possible guarantor of human rights, the United States has never signed any of the conventions on the death penalty. Free of every international obligation, a number of states continue to keep condemned prisoners in inhuman segregation for years on end, until the execution is carried out, on so-called "death row".

In contravention of what may be considered a consuetude of international law with at least 72 nations across the globe upholding the non-application of the death penalty, and another 12 nations abstaining from the death penalty having signed international treaties in the United States the death penalty is handed down to minors, even though hypocritically the punishment is not carried out until the person comes of age. Despite the fact that the 84 upholding nations have special provisions to protect unborn children and safeguard the mentally handicapped, in the USA the execution of pregnant women is allowed, and several mentally handicapped people have been executed. The many death sentences and executions are a continuing consequence of racial prejudice.

The more convinced we are of the foundations on which the United States is built on freedoms, on a constitutional state, on political democracy the stronger our campaign must be.

What distinguishes a state from a totalitarian system is not ideology; it must be a matter of a number of fundamental principles: principally, the right to life and the life of rights.

Our democracies must differentiate themselves from totalitarianism as regards the practice of the death penalty, especially when it comes to brutal crimes; a constitutional state cannot respond to brutality with cruelty.

But, if we are more and more convinced that the world over, starting with the United States, the death penalty should be abolished before the dawn of the new millennium, with its abolition written into international law and regulated in the laws of every nation, then we cannot fail to be aware of the pressing need to meet up and organize ourselves into associations.

Starting with ourselves, with yourself, with the hundreds of members of parliament, Nobel prizewinners, men of science and learning the world over who have joined the campaign against the death penalty, we must build up a transnational and transdivisional political organization which has made this its goal: the Radical Party.