The right to life is the most fundamental of all human rights. It lies at the heart of international human rights law. The taking of life is too absolute, too irreversible, for one human being to inflict it on another, even when backed by legal process. Where the death penalty persists, conditions for those awaiting execution are often horrifying, leading to aggravated suffering.

Capital punishment has remained a controversial issue around the world. In June Human Rights Watch (HRW) [advocacy website] urged the Sudanese government to reform its discriminatory laws and abolish both the death penalty and all corporal punishment after a young Sudanese woman was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. Intisar Sharif Abdallah, who is believed to be under the age of 18, was sentenced in April under article 146 of Sudan's Criminal Act of 1991. In April Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy [official website] signed a bill to repeal the death penalty [JURIST report], making it the seventeenth US state to do so. New Jersey, New Mexico, New York and Illinois [JURIST reports] have all recently eliminated the death penalty, while 33 states retain its use. In 2010 Amnesty International (AI) [advocacy website] released [JURIST report] a report [text, PDF] revealing that the number of countries using the death penalty dropped in 2009, but more than 700 people were executed in 18 countries, with the most executions carried out in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the US.