The right to life has properly been characterized as an inherent and as the supreme human right, since without effective guarantee of this right, all other rights of the human being would be devoid of meaning. One of the most controversial issues related to this right is the one of the death penalty. For a very long time death penalty was considered as one of the exceptions to the right to life. Therefore, when most of the universal and regional human rights documents were adopted death penalty was still used as a form of punishment in most of the countries worldwide. While attention to the protection of human rights has recently increased, the status of death penalty in international law became very ambiguous. The aim of this thesis is firstly to analyze and compare the content of the right to life in the documents of the different human rights systems. Secondly, to answer the question whether there is universal understanding of this fundamental right. This thesis consists of the introduction, three chapters and the conclusions. The first chapter deals with the general features of the right to life and its position in the context of the other rights. In addition, it approaches the problem of the death penalty. The second chapter consists of the comparative analysis of the universal and regional (European and Inter – American) human rights systems. In the third chapter, decisions of the supreme courts of different countries, which represent different human right systems, are... [to full text]