The statement came after US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth vowed to publicly execute Nidal Malik Hasan, who was sentenced to death by a military jury after being convicted of killing 13 people and injuring 32 in a 2009 shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas.
OHCHR’s Shabia Mantoo was responding to a question from journalists at a press briefing in Geneva.
She noted that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, in response to public executions in Afghanistan and Iran had previously stressed that such executions “constitute a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.
“Failure to respect this prohibition would inevitably render the execution arbitrary in nature, and result in a violation of the right to life and the absolute prohibition of torture,” the spokesperson added.
UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said during Friday’s press briefing in New York that the “possibility of…a government executing someone in public or in front of live cameras, frankly, is abhorrent”.
Call to halt Tennessee execution
Earlier this month, OHCHR also called on the authorities in the US state of Tennessee not to pursue any further attempts to execute Christa Pike, saying her case highlights why the death penalty should be abolished.
“The death penalty has no place in any society, and Christa Pike’s case lays bare the multiple reasons why capital punishment should be abolished,” said UN Human Rights Office spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani.
“Her prolonged suffering is abhorrent, and cruel. Key fair trial concerns remain unresolved,” she said.
Ms. Pike survived a botched execution attempt and regained consciousness on 6 October.
Responding to the botched execution, Tennessee Department of Correction Commissioner Frank Strada has said he will be stepping down at the end of this month.
Executions on the rise
In a report to the Human Rights Council on the question of the death penalty, published in August 2025, UN Secretary-General António Guterres welcomed steady progress towards abolition worldwide, but expressed concern that a diminishing number of countries were substantially increasing the number of executions.
The report, which cites figures from Amnesty International, noted that 1,518 executions were recorded in 15 countries in 2024, a 32 per cent increase from 2023.
In the United States, the report noted that the President signed an executive order on 20 January 2025 lifting the federal moratorium on the death penalty, and that South Carolina had carried out an execution by firing squad in March that year – the first in the US in 15 years.
“Pending abolition, States must not violate article 7 of the Covenant by carrying out executions that are cruel, unnecessarily painful or humiliating,” the report states, referring to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
