Original papers are provided by leading authorities on the death penalty in the United States, Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States, the People's Republic of China, Europe and the United Kingdom, Africa, and the Caribbean. Following an introductory chapter, the next chapter notes that capital punishment "sits squarely within those issues which are fundamentally matters of domestic policy and in which international human rights have been increasingly assertive." The author supports the logic of international law that points toward abolition of the death penalty, and he observes that "the limitation of the death penalty is a central theme in the development of international human rights law." The next three papers address the status of the death penalty within states that rely heavily on the death penalty, namely China, the United States, and Russia (consideration is also given here to other parts of the former USSR). Two papers deal with two regions of the world where a mixed pattern is evident, namely Commonwealth Africa and the Caribbean. Two papers consider western and eastern Europe, where, by the early 1990s, the death penalty had essentially vanished. Finally, some general issues are raised in terms of the role of the medical profession in the process of capital punishment, including lethal injection, the trade in human organs, and other considerations for medical ethics. The volume concludes with a comparative study of two abolitionist struggles. Chapter endnotes and a subject index