In Argentina electric wires are attached to the fingers, toes, and genitals of a prisoner and enough voltage is applied to cause severe pain. This is torture. In the United States electric wires are attached to the shaved head of a prisoner and enough voltage is applied to cause death. This is capital punishment.
What's the difference?
There is none in terms of human rights, according to Amnesty International (AI). The Universal Declaration of Human Rights prohibits without reservation both torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment.
Not everyone agrees with AI's pronouncements on the death penalty, including some who consider themselves supporters of human rights and Amnesty International. To work to abolish torture is one thing. Even torturers won't defend torture. Performed in secret, officially denied, and eloquently denounced even by governments which have made it a science, there is a strong international consensus that it is wrong to deliberately inflict pain on a prisoner.
Killing prisoners is another matter. It all depends on how judicially it is done. Despite a U.N. resolution stating the desirability of abolition, 117 nations have written the death penalty into law. And in the past five years at least 60 have used that authority to wipe out thousands of individuals.
Far from being hidden, many such killings are announced in advance. Some take place in public, others in private ceremonies to which special observers are invited, as in the United States. Here the ritual has been enacted three times in the past four years and nearly 700 executions are now being prepared, apparently with majority support if not enthusiasm.
So why does Amnesty International jeopardize its work against political imprisonment and torture, practices which are universally condemned, by lumping them together with a practice many do not regard as a human rights violation at all?
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