• by Emma Bonino
• Friday, October 07, 2011
• Inter Press Service

There are clear indications that the world is moving away from capital punshment: the legal abolition of the sanction in recent years in many states of the US -which saw a drop in executions from 52 in 2009 to 46 in 2010-, the drop that is apparently occurring in China, the reduction in the number of capital offenses in China and Vietnam, and the thousands of death sentences commuted in Pakistan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Burma, writes Emma Bonino, Vice president of the Italian Senate and a leader of the Radical Party.

There are clear indications that the world is moving away from capital punshment: the legal abolition of the sanction in recent years in many states of the US -which saw a drop in executions from 52 in 2009 to 46 in 2010-, the drop that is apparently occurring in China, the reduction in the number of capital offenses in China and Vietnam, and the thousands of death sentences commuted in Pakistan, Kenya, Ethiopia, and Burma, writes Emma Bonino, Vice president of the Italian Senate and a leader of the Radical Party.

In this analysis, Bonino also cites the abolition of the sanction in recent years in Africa and particularly countries like Rwanda and Burundi, symbols of a continent that has been battred more than any other in recent history by human tragedy. The arrest warrant issued in 2009 by the International Criminal Court for Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir for the massacres in Darfur was a judiciary prelude to the political development that would soon occur in many Arab countries and others: the end of the myth of the invincibility of dictators who had ruled for decades.

But it isn't all good news: Iran, which has consistently finished among the world's top executioners, kicked off the new year with an orgy of executions. In North Korea public executions tripled in recent years. In Iraq there has never been a pause in executions, even under the "democratic" government of Nouri al-Maliki. In China as in Iran, and North Korea as Iraq, it will be the "parallel democracy" by the Radical Party that will have to compensate for the lack of official presence on the part of the so- called liberal, civil, abolitionist world.

(*) Emma Bonino, Vice president of the Italian Senate, is a leader of the Radical Party.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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