The United States has joined China, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe in their opposition to a proposal submitted to the United Nations by Ireland calling for an international moratorium on the death penalty.
The resolution was submitted by Ireland on behalf of the 25 present and incoming members of the European Union and was approved by the UN's Human Rights Commission - for the eighth year in a row.
Voting for the text, which calls on all states that use the death penalty to abolish it completely "and in the meantime, to establish a moratorium on executions ," was 29 for and 19 against with five abstentions.
The vote came a day after a former US state governor from the Republican Party of President George W. Bush called on the Commission to help push a global campaign to end judicial executions .
Mr George Ryan, governor of Illinois from 1999 to 2003, told the body that the death penalty system in the United States was "broken, racist and inaccurate," and often responsible for sending innocent people to their deaths.
Apart from the abolition call, the resolution urged countries still applying the death penalty for "most serious crimes" to ensure that non-violent acts including "religious practice . . . and sexual relations between consenting adults" were excluded from that category.
Supporters of the resolution said this was largely aimed against the practice in some Muslim countries of executing people who renounce Islam or of stoning women to death or beheading them for committing adultery.
Russia, which has stopped executions since it abandoned the communist system in 1991, voted in favour of the resolution, as did its former fellow Soviet republic Ukraine.
Other Commission members backing the call included Australia; African nations South Africa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Swaziland and Gabon; Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Peru from Latin America; and Nepal and Bhutan from Asia.
Among those who opposed it were Japan; African nations Egypt, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Uganda; Bahrain and Qatar in the Middle East; and India, Indonesia and Pakistan from Asia.