The U.S. press spotlighted the recent decision by 120 governments to create an International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. That the new court would not impose the death sentence went largely unreported. But it was the high-water mark of a decade of efforts to abolish the death penalty in international law. The impact of this new abolitionism on the U.S. became clear in December 1998, when Germany agreed to extradite a suspect in the terrorist bombing of American embassies only on condition that he would not face the death penalty. International law limits to the use of the death penalty are not new, but until recently they have been narrowly drawn. In the 1950s, when the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) was being drafted, capital punishment was not generally seen as a human rights violation, provided the defendant was adult and sentence of death followed a trial in which due process rights had been scrupulously honored. This attitude is changing. In the last decade a growing number of states have ended capital punishment under their national laws and are using and interpreting international law as an instrument to restrict its use and, ultimately, to abolish it as a penalty. In the same period, the U.S. has moved in a different direction, expanding the scope of federal and state death penalty laws, cutting back legal challenges by those on death row, and carrying out their execution. One effect of this divergence between the U.S. and many of its key international allies has been to isolate the U.S. on an issue which is seen increasingly by other governments not merely as a question of domestic law and policy, but as implicating internationally protected human rights. As a result, the U.S. is criticized by United Nations (U.N.) rights bodies for breaches of international law, its extradition requests are refused by European states where the prisoner could face a death sentence in the US, and the Supreme Court has found itself in the uncomfortable position of refusing a stay of execution ordered by the International Court of Justice.(1) These developments are part of an international movement to abolish the death penalty which bases itself on the human rights principles of the right to life and the right to be protected from cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Abolitionists also draw support from studies which demonstrate convincingly that a sentence of life imprisonment has as great a deterrent effect on the commission of violent crime as capital punishment. Since 1993, this sea change in international attitudes to the death penalty has produced tangible results. The international community, led by the U.S. in the U.N. Security Council, responded to war crimes in Yugoslavia and genocide in Rwanda by creating the first international criminal tribunals. The statutes of both tribunals expressly exclude the death penalty. In 1994, abolition of the death penalty in peace time became a treaty requirement for all new members of the forty-state Council of Europe. While this may seem no more than a logical development for stable and relatively prosperous western European democracies, it is uncharted territory for new democracies with high crime rates and weak legal systems. Nonetheless, when the Russian Federation negotiated its admission to the Council of Europe in 1996, abolition of capital punishment was one of the terms of the agreement. In 1995, the new South African Constitutional Court reviewed the range of comparative national and international legal arguments advanced for and against capital punishment and ruled it to be unconstitutional.(2) The Rome Diplomatic Conference's 1998 decision that the ICC will have no power to impose death sentences means that those convicted of the most serious international crimes will face only a life sentence.(3) How has this dramatic change in international attitudes come about, what is the actual content of international law, and what does it mean for death penalty opponents in the U. …