An American teenager has leapt to fame in Europe, where she has become the subject for debate. She is not a pop-star nor an athlete of international repute, but a confessed murderer. This girl is Paula Cooper, a very young black girl from Gary (Indiana), the Washington Post explained, in a front page feature in September 1987, from which we are quoting and which came out in favour of the European campaign. Paula was sentenced to the electric chair for a crime committed when she was fifteen years old: in Europe, she has become the symbol of the atrocity of capital punishment and the campaign for its abolition. It was the Radical Party which began mobilisation especially in Italy - immediately after Paula's sentence - by starting to collect signatures, by a series of demonstrations and by the promotion of the "Non uccidere" (Do not kill) Co-ordination, which now links more than a hundred religious and lay organisations in the common campaign for the abrogation of this dismal punishment. In Europe since then, a

bout three million signatures have been collected. Greatly respected figures such as Pope John Paul II were mobilised and hundreds of thousands of petitions and requests reached the Governor of the State of Indiana and President Reagan. Thus a "Paula Cooper" case was launched and it re-opened the debate on capital punishment - at least in some sectors of American public opinion. And now the campaign, which up to now has often reached the United States through television and the press, is leaving Europe to be transferred to the United States itself at the beginning of next spring, with a great Europe-America Convention. This is because the US is and remains the foremost immediate spokesman for the abolition campaign. It is inherent in the credibility of the democratic world; it is inherent in the "exportability" of the concrete values of justice and liberty wherever these are outraged, violated or derided. Justice and rights cannot be contagious, nor the respect for and affirmation of these qualities where th

ey are trampled on, until an alternative to capital punishment becomes a permanent part of the legal order of a great democratic country. Being civilised means being different from people who kill.