This month Trinidad and Tobago made headlines by carrying out the first execution in five years. But far more indicative of world trends, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, was Russia's commutation of the death sentences of some 716 condemned prisoners. It's a worldwide trend that is leaving the United States, the self-proclaimed champion of human rights, increasingly isolated. PNS associate editor Michael Kroll writes widely on death penalty issues.

With each execution, the United States -- the world's champion of human rights -- is moving more and more outside the margins of acceptable international law and practice. Indeed last year, when the U.N. Commission on Human Rights approved a resolution calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, the United States found itself voting with China, Iraq and Libya in opposition to it.

This month Russian leader Boris Yelstin commuted the death sentences of the last of 716 condemned prisoners in Russia. This leaves the country -- historically among the world's biggest executioners -- only a step way from legal abolition. That last step is not likely to come soon, however, since Communists in the parliament, like our own Republican and Democratic legislators, still support capital punishment.

Nevertheless, more than half the countries in the world have now banned the death penalty in law or in practice, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, DC. Some 104 -- including Russia and South Africa -- no longer execute their citizens while 91 others, like China, the United States, and Trinidad and Tobago, continue the practice.

Fueling the trend toward abolition is the desire of newly emerging European states to join the Council of Europe, which requires member states to abolish the death penalty. Russia has now joined its former republics, the Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, as de facto abolitionist countries. Albania, Latvia, Estonia, Bulgaria and Lithuania have all suspended its use.

The move to abolition is not limited to Europe or the former Soviet Union. Malawi recently announced a moratorium on executions, and the Republic of South Africa parliament formally abolished the death penalty after its Constitutional Court declared the practice unconstitutional.

The growing isolation of the United States on capital punishment is even more dramatically illustrated when it comes to executing juvenile offenders, defined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) as anyone under 18 at the time of the offense. The U.S. signed the ICCPR in 1977 and ratified it in 1992. Yet, since 1977, twelve juvenile offenders have been put to death and more than 120 have been sent to death rows across the country. By the end of 1998, seventy-four men were on death row for crimes committed at age 16 to 18. Two-thirds are non white; two-thirds of their victims were white adults.

The United States is the only country in the world that has not ratified the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child -- largely because it bars the executions of minors. The United States is alone in the world in this regard. Even China changed its Criminal Law in 1997 to abolish the death penalty for those under the age of 18 at the time of their crime.

The law permitting U.S. states to execute juvenile offenders was settled in 1998 when the Supreme Court ruled that executions for children age fifteen or younger at the time of their crimes is unconstitutional (Thompson v. Oklahoma). In fact, putting juvenile offenders to death remains almost entirely a Southern phenomenon and, like executions in general, Texas is far and away the leader of the pack. Of the dozen people put to death since 1977 for crimes committed as minors, seven have been carried out in Texas. The remaining five are spread among five states: South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia and Missouri.

The effect of permitting the execution of juveniles anywhere in America has ratcheted up the system of punitive laws aimed at children everywhere in America. A newly-minted juvenile crime bill already passed by the Senate is now being debated in the House of Representatives. While liberals (and the media) focus their attention on the largely meaningless gun control provisions in the bill, they have virtually ignored its Draconian new sentencing provisions.

If this bill becomes law, children as young as fourteen will be subjected to adult trials and adult punishments in adult prisons, including life without the possibility of parole. While children as young as sixteen are now potentially subject to such treatment, that decision rests in the hands of a judge after a deliberative judicial process that includes rules of evidence, the right to confront witnesses, etc. Congress wants to change that so that the decision to treat children as young as fourteen as adults will be made by elected District Attorneys whose deliberations too often concern their higher political ambitions. The result will be a vast increase in the number of juveniles sent to America's overcrowded and violent state prisons.

When Yelstin issued his abolitionist decree, the head of Russia's presidential Pardons Commission called it "a big step in the direction of democracy and civilization for our country." At least in regards to the death penalty and juvenile justice, the United States is marching steadily in the opposite direction.