Amnesty
tells US to stop executing child offenders
LONDON, July 18 (Reuters) - Human rights watchdog Amnesty International called
on the United States on Friday to stop executing people for crimes they
committed as children.
"The execution of child offenders has rightly become abhorrent in
virtually every corner of the world, yet the USA is shamefully ignoring the
effective ban on executing child offenders," Amnesty UK Director Kate
Allen said in a statement.
In the United States, the death penalty is a matter for individual states, some
of which permit the execution of people for crimes committed when they were
teenagers.
According to a new Amnesty report, the United States "is the only country
in the world to openly carry out child offender executions within the framework
of its ordinary criminal justice system."
The report said the United States was responsible for 13 of the 20 known
executions worldwide in the last decade for crimes committed before the
offender's 18th birthday. Five of the U.S. executions took place in the last 18
months.
Amnesty called for a ban on such executions to be recognised as a
"peremptory norm" of international law, which would make them illegal
everywhere, regardless of whether a country had signed up to treaties banning
the practice.
The other countries known to have executed child offenders in the past 20 years
are Barbados, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan and
Yemen, Amnesty said.