09/10/2015 Legal Affairs and Human Rights
To mark World Day Against the Death Penalty, Marietta Karamanli (France, SOC), the PACE’s general rapporteur on abolition of the death penalty, has made the following statement:
“The 13th World Day against the Death Penalty (10 October 2015) is focusing, inter alia, on the practice of applying the death penalty, in many cases almost automatically, to drug traffickers. Here, as in other areas, the death penalty clearly does not reduce crime, and merely lowers our society to the level of criminals. More generally, at global level, there has been some progress towards the universal abolition of this inhumane and pointless punishment.
There is still room, and hence a need, for further improvement, however. Within Europe, a Council of Europe member state, namely Russia, has not yet abolished the death penalty in law, even though the moratorium that has been in place since Russia joined the Council has been maintained, thanks notably to the case-law of the Russian Constitutional Court.
Another European country, Belarus, has unfortunately continued to carry out executions, and in so doing created a major obstacle to attempts to establish closer relations with the Council of Europe.
At the same time, several countries with observer status with the Council of Europe, such as the United States and Japan, and North African countries which have close ties with our Organisation, such as Morocco, Tunisia and Palestine, need to commit themselves to abolition.
Our fight is not only morally but also politically justified, in that it is about protecting men and women and encouraging a rational policy. Punishment, however necessary it may be, should never deprive convicts of the chance to reform. For deterrence to be effective, moreover, the community must be able to protect its members through mechanisms which do not turn convicts into potentially more dangerous individuals and which do not encourage fanaticism of the kind seen today, where death, for oneself and for others, is precisely what is sought.
It is vital that we continue our fight, which is more than ever a political one.