Subject: HANDS OFF CAIN - The Brussels Resolution
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The first Congress to found the Association "HANDS OFF CAIN - Citizens' and
Parliamentarians' Campaign for the Abolition of the Death Penalty Worldwide
by 2000", meeting in Brussels on 9 and 10 December 1993,
- maintains that the right of every human being not to be killed following
a sentence or judicial measure, even when issued in respect of the law,
should be affirmed as a fundamental and inviolable individual right in
every legal system, with particular reference to those States that are
presently in the process of revising their Constitutions;
- asks all parliamentarians and supporters of this Campaign to undertake
any useful action with their respective Governments (motions, popular
petitions, information offensives) that will commit them to:
1) affirming in their foreign policy and within the sphere of international
institutions - and above all at the United Nations - the principle of a
State's not having the right to dispose of the life of any of its subjects
who have been condemned by a court, even in the case of the most heinous
crimes, and to affirm this principle, first and foremost, by obtaining a
moratorium on all executions;
2) requesting the UN Security Council to intervene where a "coup d'e'tat"
has taken place or where civil war has broken out when these situations
constitute a threat to world peace and security, by imposing a moratorium
on all executions, and where this moratorium is violated, by imposing all
the sanctions provided for in the UN Charter;
3) supporting the project for the setting up of a Permanent Tribunal to
prosecute international crimes which, in all cases, will exclude recourse
to the death penalty, as has already been decreed in the Statute of the ad
hoc Tribunal to prosecute crimes in the Former Yugoslavia;
4) setting in motion the procedure of international dispute, according to
Article 41 of the International Pact for Civil and Political Rights,
against member States who apply the death penalty in such a way as to
violate the restrictions laid down in Article 6 of the Pact (extreme
gravity of the crime committed, inapplicability of the death penalty in the
case of minors under 18 and pregnant women);
5) systematically raising objections to the reservations made by States
which, when ratifying the International Pact for Civil and Political
Rights, refuse to accept any or all restrictions on imposing the death
penalty provided for therein; also confirming the evolution of
International Law which tends to exclude the possibility of making any
reservations on human rights' accords;
- asks the elected representatives and the supporters of this Campaign to
undertake with every institution the development of political and cultural
relations with at least a country that maintains the death penalty in order
to abolish it by 2000.
- commits its Executive Organs to start the procedure of federation with
the Transnational Radical Party and with all abolitionist organizations, in
view of our common goals to defend a right to life and a life of rights;
