Amnesty calls on Liberia to repeal death penalty law

This AFP article describes Amnesty International’s call for Liberia to repeal a recently-passed law that will allow the death penalty for certain crimes.

The article clarifies a few things for me:

Liberian law already included the possibility of the death penalty, but in 2005, the country should have incorporated into law the Second Optional Protocol [to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights], thereby abolishing the deathpenalty for all crimes.

Under customary international law, as reflected in Article 27 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which Liberia ratified in August 1985, a state “may not invoke the provisions of its internal law as a justification for its failure to perform a treaty”, Amnesty said.