The EU, former US president Jimmy Carter and the ex president of the former Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev called on the US Supreme Court on Monday to end the death penalty for offenders younger than 18 at the time of their crimes.
"The execution of persons below 18 years of age at the time of their offenses violates widely accepted human rights norms and the minimum standards of human rights set forth by the United Nations," the EU and the former political leaders asserted in a legal submission to the court.
The brief was also supported by Canada and Mexico.
The US' highest court is examining the legality of executions of offenders aged under 18 at the time of their crimes and is expected to issue a ruling in the autumn.
The member countries of the EU declared themselves "opposed to the death penalty in all cases," and suggested the US position on the execution of juvenile offenders "is out of step with the international community."
Carter, Gorbachev and 16 other Nobel peace price winners supported the brief to the court which was also backed by US medical groups and American diplomats.
The court is reviewing the case of Chris Simmons, condemned to death for throwing a woman off a bridge over the Meramec river in Missouri after tying her up with electrical wire and robbing her apartment in September 1993.
Simmons was 17 when he threw the woman from the bridge. Missouri's highest state court commuted his sentence to life imprisonment in August 2001, judging his death sentence unconstitutional.
The execution of juvenile killers is permitted in 19 US states, but actual executions remain rare.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema