ABSTRACT: The death penalty. A world campaign organized by the Radical Party presses for its total abolition by the year 2000 and sends a petition to Pope John Paul II. The acme of the initiative will be the Easter march, at the conclusion of which the Pope will be asked to intercede with the heads of State to suspend executions.

(FAMIGLIA CRISTIANA, 9 February 1994)

If we had been born, say, in Milan in 1600, we would have considered it perfectly normal for our neighbour, accused of being a plague-spreader, to be tortured to confess. Then came Cesare Beccaria, and this normality became a barbarity of the past.

If we had been born, say, in Atlanta during the last century, one fine day we would have gone to the fair to choose a couple of strong slaves for our family, one of the 350,000 white families of Southern America which still in 1860 owned 3 million black slaves. Then came Abraham Lincoln, and slavery ceased being an ordinary custom and turned into a horror. Thus did our historical conscience evolve. Today, however, we coexist with another shame: the death penalty, which is practiced in 105 countries of the world. As many as 2,700 inmates are waiting to be executed in the US prisons' death rows. In 1993, thirty-eight sentences were carried out, and four of those executed were minors when they committed the crimes. But the sinister record belongs to another major power, China, with 1249 ascertained executions in 1993. These figures, disclosed by Amnesty International, are by defect: we know that in China executions are carried out in football stadiums on dozens of convicts at a time.

When will another Beccaria or another Lincoln come to transform this normality into barbarity? This is no time for charismatic leaders capable of changing age-old traditions and deep-seated regulations by the clicking of their fingers or of changing the current trends. What most counts is the opinion movements, the grass-roots initiatives, especially in such serious moments.

This is the context for the world campaign for the abolition of the death penalty by the Year 2000. The campaign's slogan refers to the person who is a universal symbol for fratricidal murder: "Hands off Cain". The words are taken from the Bible (Genesis, 4, 15): "The Lord marked Cain so that anyone who encountered him would kill him".

Promoted by the Radical Party, the campaign has received massive international support. Its acme will be the Easter March on 3 April, when it will cross Rome and stop in St.Peter's square, followed by a meeting between the Pope and the delegations of various parts of the world.

Says Emma Bonino, MP and Radical Party secretary: "At Christmas the U.S. President Clinton sent a videocassette to the Pope, acknowledging his fundamental role in the battle for human rights in the world. Also, let us not forget that many capital executions in the United States have been suspended following an intervention of the Pope, and that the American clergy and the Catholics are widely against the death penalty. Thus, we shall send the Pope a petition (signed by Nobel Prize winners, personalities of the political, religious, cultural fields and by representatives of international organizations) urging him to ask Clinton and the heads of the states where the death penalty is applied to suspend all announced executions and apply the principles of the Statute of the Tribunal on ex-Yugoslavia, which they themselves have approved".

The State cannot dispose of citizens' lives.

These are two steps towards the total abolition of the death penalty the world over which we hope to achieve by the Year 2000. The reference to the statute of the International tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, which will prosecute the "butchers of Sarajevo", is fundamental. For the first time the death penalty had been excluded in the name of an important principle for a new penal law: States may not dispose of its citizens' lives. This is truly one of the major revolutions that could form a different historical conscience.

Compared to previous initiatives "Hands off Cain" presents a more advanced point of view. Anti-death penalty campaigns normally aim to save the lives of an innocent or presumed innocent. Or extreme cases are proposed, cases that move people, such as a minor (we all remember the case of Paula Cooper, the black teenager who killed her teacher and who was spared the electric chair following a wave of international indignation) or a handicapped or socially maladjusted person.

The new aspect lies in the fact that prohibiting the death penalty would not only be useless, but would divide the world into "civil" and "uncivil" countries. For instance, the Islamic countries, where age-old traditions legitimate capital punishment not as a punishment but as a release. Instead, a step-by-step strategy such as a moratorium of the executions, the guarantee of a public trial, the reduction of the number of crimes that can be punished with the death penalty, can gradually lead to the desired abolition by the Year 2000. Said United Nations Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali last year at the opening of the Wien conference on human rights: "I would like to say, and I am most serious about this, that human rights are not to be considered as the lowest common denominator of nations, but - on the contrary - as an irreducible human value which allows us to say that we belong to a single human family".