THE WORLD'S HANDS ABOVE CAINS

by Olga Cechurova and Paolo Atzori

The long-term struggle of the Transnational Radical Party and International League for the Abolition of the Death Penalty - currently its federated organization Hands Off Cain - has made remarkable progress, in particular on the level of international institutions, since 1993, when they promoted officially the worldwide campaign for the abolition. The TRP's efforts, concentrated campaigns on many levels that consolidates citizens and politicians in gaining clear support and steps in this matter from the national parliaments as well as international institutions, brought several important results.

It is worth to mention once again the exclusion of the capital punishment from the statute of the International Courts set up for crimes in former Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as from the draft statute of the Permanent International Criminal Court.

During the last 4 years some both European and non-European countries have modified their approach to this fundamental aspect of the human rights. The situation has notably improved inside the European Community, where the abolitionist position is strengthening. Some Member States - Belgium, Spain and Italy - have proceeded to the total abolition of the capital punishment, which is no more applied even to the war crimes. Outside the Community, within the Council of Europe, those states that applied for the membership Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, - have consequently approved the moratorium on capital executions for having the time to change the constitutions in a proper way. Georgia and Armenia are fastly moving in the same direction.

More recently, the EU, at the end of the last IGC, included in the Amsterdam treaty a paragraph affirming the importance it attaches to the universal abolition of the death penalty.

The European Parliament repeatedly raised its voice against the death penalty, at the beginning pronouncing itself on specific cases (Algeria, Egypt, US), lately focusing on the death penalty in general. This growth of awareness is especially reflected in some resolutions adopted by the EP and by the ACP-EU Joint Assembly during 1996 and 1997 that reaffirmed "its absolute opposition to the death penalty". Both the EP resolution of 20 of february 1997 and the ACP-EU's call "on all member states to support a resolution urging a UN moratorium on executions during the 1997 Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights as a first step towards the abolition of the death penalty for all crimes".

The concrete proof of the international community's capacity to reach very important decision in favour of principles of democracy and respect for human rights is the adoption of a resolution asking the UN General Assembly to adopt a universal moratorium on executions by the UN Commission on Human Rights on the 3rd of April this year. The constant efforts of the radicals, that had been determining for the approval of the resolutions at the EP, especially the last 5 ones, triggered a very important mechanism inside the UN Commission, convincing Italy, soon followed by other EU member countries, to lead the group of countries supporting the resolution for the moratorium. The resolution expresses its conviction that abolition of the death penalty contributes to the enhancement of human dignity and to the progressive development of human rights, underlining thus the universal extent of Human Rights.

This unexpected result reverses the vote of the 1994 UN General Assembly,when a resolution asking for a universal moratorium of capital executions was rejected for only 7 votes. The battle lost, and thanks to this defeat, the abolitionist front has been able to measure the strength, the strategy and the position of the "enemy" it has to fight with. The UN success of 1997 shows first of all that the unity of the anti-abolitionist countries is not unbreakable (inside this front there are quite different countries such as China and US, Japan and Burma or Indonesia), it is therefore possible to change a balance that appears to be more fragile than one could think.

Still, the UN remains for us the main "battle field" - the one for the institution of the universal moratorium on executions in the next session of the UN General Assembly, thus leading to the universal abolition of the death penalty. Not to waste the momentum that the radicals hardly created in the UN Commission on Human rights, Hands off Cain and the Radical Party relaunched a massive campaign addressing to the thousands of MPs, Lord Mayors, and local representatives, an appeal that asks "the governments of the Member States of the United Nations to promote and support, in the next meeting of the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva as well as in the United Nations General Assembly, those resolutions that lead to the establishment of an universal moratorium on capital executions in 1998". In order to consolidate the number of States that support the moratorium and the subsequent abolition, the radicals submit to the parliaments of different countries a draft resolution that requests the governments "suppor

ts the principles and objectives contained in the resolution of the UN Human Rights Commission".

At the same time, in as many different parliaments as possible, the same resolution should be approved to give a strong thrust to the international institutions to make 1998 the year of the universal moratorium on capital executions. Such possible success, a hundred years after the universal abolition of slavery, implies that we gather all the existing energies in the fulfilment of this fundamental step towards the definitive abolition of death penalty worldwide.