Right to life - capital punishment
The right to life is recognized in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and in Article 37(a) in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
UN and the capital punishment
In 1984, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) adopted the document Safeguards guaranteeing protection of the rights of those facing the death penalty, which imposes restrictions on the use of the death penalty as well as the treatment of prisoners.
In order to undertake an international commitment to abolish the death penalty, the General Assembly, in its 1989 resolution 44/128, adopted and proclaimed the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aiming at the abolition of the death penalty. The protocol entered into force in 1991.
The ECOSOC invites the Secretary-General to submit to it, at five-year intervals, periodic updated and analytical reports on capital punishment entitled Capital Punishment and Implementation of the Safeguards Guaranteeing Protection of the Rights of Those Facing the Death Penalty.
Human Rights Council and the capital punishment
The Commission on Human Rights by its resolution Question of the death penalty, resolution 1999/61, commended countries, which had abolished the death penalty and urged the international community to limit their application of capital punishment.
The Commission on Human Rights established a Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions to examine, monitor and report on the death penalty worldwide. The special rapporteur reports regularly to the Human Rights Council.
More on UN and the right to life
- At the website of the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions there are:
- Background information
- Annual reports
- Reports from country visits
Human rights, conventions and declarations
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Swedish | in English
- Resolution 217 A (III) / A/RES/217(III) adopted by the UN General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 during its 183rd plenary meeting
- The Core International Human Rights Instruments and their monitoring bodies
- Universal Human Rights Index - UHRI. Human rights recommendations from all parts of the UN system: the UN Treaty Monitoring Bodies, the Human Rights Council mechanisms Universal Periodic Review and Special Procedures. Each document links to other related information in the database
- Charter-based Body Database. Documents and reports of the Human Rights Council, its predecessor and their subsidiaries and parent organs. Maintained by OHCHR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights).
- Treaty Body Database. Full text documents from the UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies
- Yearbook on Human Rights 1946-1988
- OHCHR website for background information, documents and reports.
- Research guides by the UN library Dag Hammarskjöld Library:
Key UN documents
- UN Charter in Swedish | in English
- UN System Chart
- Yearbook of the United Nations
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Swedish | in English
- Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action
- Statue of the International Court of Justice
UN documents and publications in catalogues and databases
- United Nations Digital Library. UN official documents and open access publications, UN maps, UN voting data and speeches.
- UN iLibrary. UN publications online covering different topics.
- ODS. UN documents published from 1993 onward and scanned documents published between 1946 and 1993 in the official languages of the UN.
- Daily list of documents (ODS). Documents published for the day, with full text links, can be found in the United Nations full text database ODS.
- UNBIS Thesaurus is a multilingual database of the controlled vocabulary used to describe UN documents.
- Index to proceedings is an annual bibliographic guide to the proceedings and documentation of the major UN organs. The index includes:
- a list of all documents
- a comprehensive subject index
- an index to speeches
- a voting chart of resolutions
- United Nations Documents Index (in United Nations Digital Library). References to all documents by subject area are published. A collection of indexes is held by the Dag Hammarskjöld and Law Library, Uppsala, Sweden and the UN Library in New York and the UN library in Geneva.