Fourth World Congress Against the Death Penalty Meets in Geneva

"Death penalty opponents see executions on the wane," is the Reuters report written by Jonathan Lynn and edited by Noah Barkin.

An increasing number of countries are abolishing the death penalty and even the most active users of capital punishment are taking steps to restrict it, a congress of abolitionists heard on Wednesday.

The three-day World Congress Against the Death Penalty hopes to give momentum to a trend that has seen roughly 4 countries a year, especially in Africa and Central Asia, join the ranks of abolitionists in recent decades.

"There is a new trend against the death penalty that is something new for the world," said Mario Marazziti, spokesman for the Community of Sant'Egidio, an Italian advocacy group that is one of the driving forces in the global campaign to stop the death penalty.

The congress is backed by the Swiss government and draws strong support from Italy and Spain -- reflecting the fact that Europe is now almost entirely free of executions.

The campaign was given support by a non-binding United Nations resolution in 2007 calling on countries who use the death penalty to introduce a moratorium and arguing that capital punishment undermined human dignity and was not a deterrent.

Marazziti told a briefing that 56 countries continued to execute people, while 141 countries did not use the death penalty, including 93 that had formally abolished it altogether.

Since 2007 the African states of Rwanda and Burundi have abolished the death penalty, joining Cambodia to show that even countries that have suffered genocide can drop it.

AFP reports, "Europeans step up pressure for global halt to death penalty," via the Sydney Morning Herald.

European countries on Wednesday stepped up pressure for a global halt to the death penalty, as opponents of capital punishment hailed the growing number of countries scrapping or suspending executions.

The United Nations and participants in the World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Geneva said about 140 countries had now abolished death sentences or stopped carrying them out.

"More than two-thirds of the United Nations member states abolished the death penalty, by law or in practice," Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero of Spain, which holds the presidency of the European Union, told the congress.

Two decades ago the list included about 50 countries.

"The balance has tipped and the speed has been extraordinary, we have seen a grand global change," said Norwegian Deputy Foreign Minister Gry Larsen.

But concern was focused on the countries that account for about 93 percent of executions between them, according to Amnesty International -- China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the United States -- as well as North Korea.

Zapatero said Spain would set up an international commission made up of eminent people later this year to press for a global moratorium on the death penalty by 2015, "as a preliminary step to total abolition."

The United Nations News Centre has distributed, "Senior UN official cites evidence of growing support for abolishing death penalty."

There is evidence of growing global support for the eventual elimination of the death penalty, a senior United Nations official stated today, while acknowledging that abolishing this practice is a difficult and sensitive process for many societies.

Sergei A. Ordzhonikidze, Director-General of the UN Office at Geneva, told the Fourth World Congress against the Death Penalty, held at the Palais des Nations, that moving this process forward will require comprehensive and inclusive national debates.

“It is my hope that the discussions at this World Congress, which will highlight the practical experiences of countries that have either abolished the death penalty or instituted a moratorium, can help to stimulate such national debates.”

And:

Some 2,000 participants, including national political leaders, activists and representatives of international organizations, have gathered in Geneva for the three-day Congress.

"The death penalty: A question of human rights," is the title of the Deutsche Welle report by Andreas Zumach and Jan Bruck, edited by Robert Mudge.

For 200 years now the international movement for the universal abolition of the death penalty has been spearheaded by Italy. With the start of the congress, Laura Mirachian, Italian Ambassador to the United Nations, underlined the special role of her country in the fight against the death penalty. "We have a long tradition of rejecting the death penalty. This is deeply rooted in our culture,” she told Deutsche Welle. “It goes back as far as the 18th century. Tuscany was the first state to abolish the death penalty in 1786 during the war.”

However, it took the modern Italy until 1948 to actually abolish it. In the same year, the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” adopted by the UN General Assembly laid the legal groundwork for the fight against the death penalty. Although the abolition is not explicitly mentioned, Article 3 guarantees the right to life free from inhumane or humiliating punishment.

Yet, in the first 20 years of the declaration, only the newly founded Federal Republic of Germany rejected the death penalty in 1949. Not until the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1966 did the UN ask its member states to abolish the death penalty or at least restrict it to very serious crimes.

This was a first, albeit only a perfunctionary breakthrough. Until then the death penalty was the unchallenged international norm, says Mario Morazzitti, speaker of the Italian religious group Sankt Egidio. “Until the 1970s only 23 nations abolished the death penalty.” But since 1980 Morazzitti identifies among the 192 member states a clear trend away from the death penalty. “During the last 30 years, there has been a dramatic shift. Europe became the first continent in the world where there was no death penalty.”

And:

Over 140 states have in the meantime stopped imposing the death penalty. The majority of them have abolished it by law for all crimes without exception not only in times of peace but also during war. However, 56 states and territories still hold on to the death penalty. Last year, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and the US carried out the most death penalties in the world.

Activists at the 4th world congress in Geneva hope to achieve a moratorium on the imposition and execution of the death penalty in those 56 states and territories and push them further toward complete abolition. This goal is to be reinforced by a new resolution in the General Assembly later this year. Activists hope that this time the majority for the resolution will be bigger than in 2007 and that the US and China will not vote against it but abstain from their vote.

At truthout, Mary Susan Littlepage posts, "4th World Congress Seeks to Abolish Death Penalty."

More than 1,000 people are expected to attend the 4th World Congress Against the Death Penalty February 24-26 in Geneva. The Congress is organized by the French NGO Ensemple in partnership with the Swiss Confederation and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

During the 3rd World Congress Against the Death Penalty, held in Paris in 2007, Micheline Calmy-Rey, federal councillor and head of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland, invited the event's organizer to hold this year's Congress in Geneva. Abolition of capital punishment is a foreign policy priority in Switzerland, and Switzerland is co-funding half of the Congress's budget.

Arnaud Gaillard, coordinator of the 4th World Congress, said the conference wants to welcome different countries and aims to build strategies to help them abolish the death penalty.

The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty was created in Rome in 2002. It's composed of 104 bar associations, cities, local groups, unions and the like. It is actively supported by the European Union, and it aims to strengthen the international dimension of the fight against the death penalty.

And:

The conference will feature two plenary sessions, ten roundtables and nine workshops. A cultural program aimed at the general public will also be organized in parallel at the International Conference Centre in Geneva and within the city,, which is the world capital of human rights and home to a number of international organizations.

The World Congress Against the Death Penalty is a triennial opportunity to bring together abolitionist groups and strengthen the international dimension of the fight against the death penalty. More specifically, the Fourth Congress will pursue the following goals:

• To strengthen ties between civil society, international and intergovernmental institutions and organizations as well as national and local entities in support of the abolitionist movement.
• To involve players of retentionist states, which are territories that retain the death penalty for ordinary crimes, from so-called Southern regions in the defining and leading of abolitionist strategies.
• To increase the political, diplomatic, religious, social and cultural impact on retentionist states.
• To enlarge the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty and to encourage the building of national and regional coalitions.

Comments

[Together against death penalty]

Dear abolitionist friends,

The videos of th 4th Congress against death penalty are now on Youtube !

The association Together Against the Death Penalty has the pleasure to announce to you that the videos of the
4th World Congress Against the Death Penalty are available on the internet,notably on Youtube :

Presentation video clip of the Congress, part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C06Z8MN2Ivc
The second part : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEyMpGFuK0o

To reach the page of Together Against Death Penalty :
http://www.youtube.com/user/ECPMassociation

Together against death penalty
http://www.abolition.fr