A. EUROPE (Czechoslovakian release)

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To the Czechoslovakian federal Assembly

To the European Parliament

Copy to:

The President of the Czechoslovakian Republic

The Czechoslovakian Government

The European Council

The European Commission

We the undersigned, European citizens,

considering

that the policies and the governments of the national States prove increasingly inadequate and incapable of facing the priorities and the political, environmental, economic and social problems related to the ever increasing interdependence of the very life of the different societies, of the territories, of humanity at large;

considering

that the accomplishment and consolidation of the principles of democracy and legality in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe finally enable the overcoming of the political and strategic prejudices which hindered an extensive process of European integration, of constitution of the United States of Europe in democracy, freedom, non-violence and tolerance;

considering

that we feel the responsibility and the need to take active part in the process of formation of the United States of Europe, that is, the creation of a European democratic federation;

considering

that the further political, economic and social developments of the process of renaissance of Czechoslovakia, started on the 17th of November of the past year, and the future itself of Europe will depend also from the capacity of Czechoslovakia to enter as as actor and not as a spectator in the process of the construction of the United States of Europe;

WE ASK

The Czechoslovakian federal Assembly

- to approve a resolution committing the Czechoslovakian government to present, within a short lapse of time, a request of adhesion to the European Community, as a first step toward the creation of the United States of Europe;

- to approve a resolution to be sent to all the Parliaments of the Continent, informing them of the willingness of Czechoslovakia to take part in a "Constituent of the United States of Europe", with the task of establishing Institutions and elaborating a Constitution, as well as common federal and democratic rules for all the States adhering in the fields of foreign, monetary, macroeconomic, macroenvironmental, and security policies;

To the European Parliament

- to approve a resolution which includes the resolve expressed by the signers of the petition, and declares the preventive willingness of the European Community to accept the adhesion of Czechoslovakia.

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B. DEATH PENALTY (common to all countries)

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To the Parliament

To the Head of the Government

To the European Parliament

Copy to:

The President of the Republic

The President of the European Council

The President of the European Commission

We the undersigned, European citizens,

CONSIDERING:

- that the basis of democracy is the primacy of the right to live, asserted and guarantied by the law;

- that the death penalty represents an accomplishment or a residue of totalitarianism, because it gives the state the power of life or death on the citizen, power which is typical of totalitarian regimes;

- that the death penalty therefore represents an extremely serious contradiction in the democratic regulations that provide for it;

- that the most enlightened juridical personages have been denying the death penalty any preventive and dissuasive effectiveness on the commission of crimes for centuries, as the scientific investigations long since prove;

- that one of the most important bases of any regulation based on democratic principles is the provision of penalties that favour the rehabilitation of the condemned person to social life;

- that to prescribe and to carry out a death sentence represents a surrender of the state, which at that moment declares to be capable only of suppressing the life of the author of a crime, not of rehabilitating him to social life, setting itself at the same level of the delinquent it is suppressing, and thus denying its superiority of organ that enforces the law;

- that the death penalty is irreversible. Decided through legal procedures which are, as such, fallible, by human beings who are, as such, fallible, it can be inflicted on completely innocent persons;

- that the death penalty is contrary - because it is a cruel, inhuman and degrading sanction - to any international Treaty concerning human rights;

WE ASK

- that the Parliament and the Government of the countries whose regulations still include capital punishment - also in the case that such penalty is provided for only in particular or extraordinary cases - immediately begin the legislative procedure aimed at the complete and final abolition of the death penalty;

- that the Parliament and the Government of those countries whose regulations do not provide for capital punishment operate with decisiveness and ask - both bilaterally and multilaterally - for the abolition of the capital punishment to the states that still enforce it.