Kazakhstan abolishes the death penalty

Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev on Saturday January 2 signed the decree abolishing the death penalty in Kazakhstan.

AFP - CHRISTOF STACHE

Text by: RFI Follow

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Kazakhstan has abolished the death penalty, the presidency said on Saturday (January 2nd).

Since 2003, the country had already put in place a moratorium on executions.

Today, in the former USSR, only Belarus continues to apply the death penalty regularly. 

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The announcement was made on the Kazakhstan Presidency website.

The decree was signed by

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev

, AFP reports.

The death penalty had not been applied in the country since 2003, but the courts continued to impose death sentences.

Among the last condemned to death, one of the perpetrators of an attack in June 2016 in Almaty in which 8 police officers and two civilians were killed.

With the signing by President Tokayev of this text, already ratified last year by Parliament, death sentences are converted to life sentences - this is the case of Ruslan Kulekbayev, who in 2016 killed eight police officers and two civilians.

Kazakhstan had not passed the death penalty since 2004, but in this specific case had made an exception.

Because if the executions had been suspended since the beginning of the 2000s, the courts could still pronounce death sentences in the event of exceptional crimes, according to them of terrorism.

Today in the former USSR, only Belarus continues to apply the death penalty regularly.

China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt

In 2020, in addition to Kazakhstan,

Chad

,

Guinea

, and in the United States, the state of

Colorado

, enshrined the prohibition of the death penalty in their constitutions.

Saudi Arabia has banned it for minors accused at the time of the facts.

Last year,

Amnesty International

recorded at least 657 executions worldwide in 2019 - the lowest figure for a decade.

Executions concentrated at 86% in four countries: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt.

But the NGO estimates that it was in China that the most people were executed in 2019, certainly thousands, but it is impossible to obtain precise figures because this data is classified as a state secret by Beijing.

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