It is now generally illegal for European countries to extradite criminals to our country, unless they first secure binding assurances that we will not impose the death penalty. Because a minority of nations, including powerful ones like China and the US, still have the death penalty, international law does not prohibit it. But international law tightly restricts it. And for the last three years the UN Human Rights Commission, by clear majority votes, has urged all countries that still have the death penalty to impose a moratorium on executions. Last year, after a mission to the US to investigate the death penalty here, the UN Special Expert on Arbitrary Executions sharply criticized our death penalty on numerous grounds.
International law imposes numerous restrictions on the death penalty.
Most of them are violated in the US and in Illinois in particular. Arbitrary executions are prohibited. But as the UN Special Expert noted, statistics show that the death penalty in the US depends not on the seriousness of the crime, but on other factors, such as the quality of the defense counsel, the race of the victim, and the economic resources of the accused. The highest procedural safeguards and standards of legal defense must be guaranteed. But in Illinois, as you know, death penalty defense is often sub-par, and our capital convictions are remarkably unreliable.