GENEVA (Feb. 4) Europeans questioned America's standing as a champion of human rights today after Texas executed a woman whose case became a rallying point for death penalty opponents around the world.

Karla Faye Tuckers execution by lethal injection Tuesday night fuelled worldwide debate on capital punishment. Her case inspired pleas of clemency from religious leaders - including Pope John Paul II.

Tucker, 38, was sentenced to death for the pickax murder of a man and woman in 1983 when she and a companion were on a three day drug binge. She became a born-again Christian in prison.

Commentators on radio France Info marvelled that neither Supreme Court justices nor the Texas governor took mercy on her.

Spain's biggest selling daily, El Pais, said the execution was "an immorality unworthy of a country that sets itself up as a defender of human rights."

Mary Robinson, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, said she was "saddened" to learn of the execution, calling the increasing use of the death penalty in the United States "a matter of serious concern."

"I have full sympathy for the families of the victims of murder and other crimes," she said, "but I do not accept that one death justifies another."

Outside the U. S. Embassy in Oslo, about a dozen protesters from Amnesty International held a peaceful vigil in bitter cold and snow, and gathered signatures on anti-death penalty petitions. Some people drove into town just to sign.

In the United States and elsewhere in the West, the countdown to Tuckers death was covered widely by the media.

In South Africa, where opposition groups want President Nelson Mandela's government to reinstate the death penalty, newspapers carried the Tucker execution story on the front page Wednesday.

"The axe-killer’s final moment," said the banner headline of The Star, a moderate Johannesburg daily, above a large color photo of Tucker and a smaller photo of the Texas death chamber.

In Asia, however, the media paid scant attention to the execution. The Yomiuri newspaper, Japan's largest daily, had the story on its second page. Even in Hong Kong, one of the few areas in the region to have abolished the death penalty, radio news gave more play to a local fire.

While the death penalty has been banned in many European countries, it is still widely accepted in much of Asia. China, for one, puts more people to death than the rest of the world combined: 4,367 in 1996.

Many Asian governments place more value on having safe streets than on human rights. Execution is even meted out in Singapore and Malaysia as punishment for nonviolent crimes such as drug possession.

Harno Nakamura, a 71-year-old retired engineer living in Tokyo, said he was surprised at an the fuss in the West over the execution.

"It was natural that she be executed," he said. "What she did was cruel, inhuman. She could have killed again."