After Making Pledge Liar Biden Refuses to Adopt UN Resolution for a Moratorium on the Death Penalty as a Record No. of Nations Do So. US Death Row is 41% Black, but Blacks are Only 13% the Population
/From [HERE] With the support of a record 125 nations, the United Nations General Assembly has overwhelmingly adopted a resolution calling for a global moratorium on the use of the death penalty with a view towards its ultimate abolition. The United States voted no, placing it in the company of Iran, Iraq, Saudia Arabia, China, North Korea, and Vietnam.
The final vote, taken on the 15th anniversary of the General Assembly’s first adoption of a moratorium resolution on December 15, 2007, was 125 nations in favor, 37 opposed, and 22 abstentions. Support for a global execution moratorium topped the previous record of 120 attained in 2018 and matched in 2020. In November 2020, 120 nations supported the resolution, 39 opposed, and 24 abstained.
In a joint statement, Penny Wong and Arnoldo André Tinoco, the foreign ministers of Australia and Costa Rica who led the moratorium discussion, characterized the supermajority vote “of almost two thirds” of the world’s nations as “historic.”
“The record level of support for the resolution shows that the majority of Member States agree this brutal and inhumane punishment must end,” they wrote. “Already, four out of every five countries have abolished the death penalty or no longer apply it.”
The U.S. vote disappointed death penalty opponents who considered the resolution a major opportunity for the Biden administration to take action to advance the President’s campaign pledge to work to end the death penalty.
Former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, who signed into law the bill abolishing the death penalty in Maryland in 2013 and now serves as a commissioner on the International Commission Against the Death Penalty, urged Biden to support the moratorium resolution. “All of America’s European allies, every country in the Western Hemisphere and a fast-increasing number of African nations will be among th[e] super-majority” supporting the resolution, he wrote in a December 12 commentary in America Magazine. “Why then would President Biden—who has done so much to repair America’s alliances abroad—have us side with Iran, Saudi Arabia and North Korea in voting for continued use of the death penalty in the world? … It is time for America to stop giving political cover on the world stage to Iranian and Saudi executions.”