At the Third Committee Ellen Margrethe Loj from Denmark,...

At the Third Committee Ellen Margrethe Loj from Denmark, speaking on behalf of the European Union, said capital punishment ought to be a feature of the past. The right to life was indeed a human right. The European Union believed as a matter of policy that the death penalty was a contravention of the right to life and called for its abolition. The European Union's position was rooted in its belief in the inherent dignity of all human beings and the inviolability of the human person. The European Union regretted that this view was not shared universally. Every execution was one too many and over the last year, the European Union had made demarches with Barbados, Belize, China, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Japan, Lebanon, Nigeria, Palestinian Territories, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and the United States of America. No legal system was immune to miscarriages of justice. They were the result of human, or sometimes technical, error, which no one could rule out. Legal errors also happened in the legal systems of the Member States of the European Union - another reason why all European Union Member States had abolished the death penalty. The European Union did not accept the argument that the death penalty was a deterrent to violent or any other forms of crime. In the European Union countries, the evidence simply did not support that claim.