10/10/2012 Legal Affairs and Human Rights
Strasbourg, 10.10.2012 – “The tide is continuing to turn against the death penalty worldwide. The Council of Europe, by making abolition of the death penalty a condition of membership, has led the way at regional level, but there is still plenty of work for us to do,” said Renate Wohlwend (Liechtenstein, EPP/CD), rapporteur of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on abolition of the death penalty, speaking today on the occasion of the World Day against the Death Penalty.
“Firstly, we must persuade Russia to keep its promise, made sixteen years ago, to abolish the death penalty in law, in addition to its existing welcome moratorium on executions. It is the only country out of the 47 Council of Europe member States which has not taken this step – and it is high time it kept its promise and joined the rest of us.
Secondly, Belarus continues to be the last European country to carry out executions, and in a particularly cruel way: the condemned are shot in the head, and their families are not told in advance. Belarus knows that ending this barbaric practice is one of the essential conditions for joining the Council of Europe.
Meanwhile, the Council of Europe is doing what it can to end executions in our southern neighbourhood. Both the Moroccan Parliament and the Palestinian National Council, in the framework of their Partnerships for Democracy with our Assembly, have pledged to work on this issue.
The Palestinian Authority continues to apply the moratorium on executions put in place in 2005, and is currently considering a draft law which would abolish the death penalty altogether. I urge it to take the plunge, and conclude this law, and urge Hamas to cease the deeply worrying illegal executions it has recently carried out, flouting Palestinian law. In Morocco, I hope that the moratorium in force since 1993 will soon be transformed into full abolition.
Finally, we continue to urge the United States and Japan, which hold observer status with the Council of Europe, to join the tide of history and move towards moratoria.
For its part, PACE will continue to do all it can to rid the world of this unjust and cruel form of punishment.”