• by Elisabetta Zamparutti
• Wednesday, August 05, 2009
• Inter Press Service

In China, a reduction in the number of executions carried out in recent years was accompanied by a promising statement by the vice president of the Supreme Court that the country would gradually slow the implementation of capital punishment to the point that there is "a very limited number of executions", writes Elisabetta Zamparutti, a deputy in the Italian parliament, a leader of the Radical Party, and editor of the annual report on the Death Penalty in the World for Hands Off Cain.

Now this process must be supported and accelerated such that China can move in the direction of the universal moratorium on executions approved by the United Nations.

Despite initial positive signs, the maximum sentence is still imposed in China for both violent and non-violent crimes, while Chinese lawyers denounce the fact that they are denied access to their clients and that many confessions are obtained by force. For the abolitionist organisation Hands Off Cain, the primary goal is to eliminate the keeping of "state secrets" regarding the death penalty, a practice still found in China as well as many other countries, nearly all authoritarian. Experience has taught us that the lack of public information on the actual implementation of the death penalty is one of the concrete causes of the elevated number of executions.

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service