TOWARDS A UNIVERSAL MORATORIUM

DEATH PENALTY::
TOWARDS A UNIVERSAL MORATORIUM
Elisabetta Zamparutti

JANUARY 2007 (IPS) - With passage of the United Nations Moratorium on Executions likely in the current General Assembly, we are on the verge of obtaining a major victory for humanity which the Non-violent and Transnational Radical Party and Hands Off Cain have been seeking for 14 years, writes Elisabetta Zamparutti, curator of the annual report of Hands Off Cain, ''The Death Penalty in the World", and a leader of the Radical Party.

After the execution of Saddam Hussein and through the moratorium campaign, Hands Off Cain and the Radical Party have succeeded in making everyone understand, even in the Arab world and beginning with the Cain of our time, the urgency of preventing a widening cycle of violence and war, in Iraq and elsewhere, which would have disastrous consequences.

It was non-violent actions that were responsible for convincing the public of the urgency a measure like the UN moratorium and so accelerated the historic process of abolitionism.

The startling drama and horror of the death penalty in the world today is to be found largely in the 98 percent of the world's 5000 years executions that are carried in totalitarian and repressive countries. It is because of the nameless and forgotten victims of the death penalty in these countries that a universal moratorium is so very important.

/NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN AUSTRALIA, CANADA, NEW ZEALAND, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, UNITED STATES, OR UNITED KINGDOM./ (END/2007)