Abolitionist States were encouraged by the debate in 1957 surrounding adoption of the right to life provision of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in the Third Committee of the General Assembly. They quickly took the initiative in the General Assembly, even before the Covenant was formally adopted in 1966. Recognizing that there might be no short-term gain in terms of norms on the death penalty, it was essential to keep the issue on the agenda of the political bodies of the United Nations. The campaign began slowly, with an innocuous call for a study of the death penalty and of its effectiveness as a deterrent. The results of this research were submitted to an expert committee, which confirmed that modern science found little to redeem the death penalty. Fortified by this support, the resolutions in the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council became more demanding, citing article 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and implying that only when capital punishment was abolished would the right to life be truly assured. In the early 1980s, the momentum of this patient activity coupled with a significant evolution in the domestic law of many States culminated in important legal developments.

In 1984, the United Nations Committee on Crime Prevention and Control (now the ‘Commission’) drafted the ‘Safeguards Guaranteeing Protection of the Rights of Those Facing the Death Penalty’, a document which was inspired in large part by articles 6, 14 and 15 of the Civil Rights Covenant but which went further, detailing the scope of the phrase ‘most serious crimes’ and adding new mothers and the insane to the categories of individuals upon whom the death penalty could never be carried out.