Bulletin Quotidien Europe 7420 - 8/3/1999 & 9/3/1999

26.(EU) NEWS OF THE WEEK: 1-7 March 1999

*** EU/Death penalty - The transnational Radical Party has launched a postcard campaign, writing to Joschka Fischer, President-in-Office of the EU Council, to ask him to take the initiative needed to enable the Fifteen to place on the agenda of the next United Nations General Assembly the question of a universal moratorium on capital punishment. Some 100 countries in the Assembly favour such a moratorium, 65 are opposed and 20 would abstain, according to the Radical Party, which recalls that the United Nations Commission on Human Rights adopted resolutions in 1997 and in 1998 in Geneva calling for such a moratorium and stating that abolition of the death penalty constitutes an expansion of the sphere of fundamental rights.