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 UNITED NATIONS (AP) - New U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ran into trouble on his first day of work Tuesday over Saddam Hussein's execution when he failed to state the United Nations' opposition to the death penalty and said capital punishment should be a decision of individual countries.
The U.N. has an official stance opposing capital punishment and Ban's predecessor Kofi Annan reiterated it frequently. The top U.N. envoy in Iraq, Ashraf Qazi, restated it again on Saturday after the former Iraqi dictator was hanged.
Ban, however, took a different approach, never mentioning the U.N. ban on the death penalty in all its international tribunals, and the right to life enshrined in the U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
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