Death penalty
March 23, 2010
Amnesty International has condemned the execution of two prisoners in Belarus and has urged President Alexander Lukashenko to impose a moratorium on the death penalty.
The group's Belarus expert Heather McGill told Deutsche Welle on Tuesday that the organization had been campaigning on behalf of the prisoners since June 2009.
"We are very disappointed that the Belarus government has seen fit to actually carry out these executions," she said.
McGill said no executions were reported in the former Soviet republic in 2009, and that there had been signs of progress. "There have been moves toward changing legislation, introducing life imprisonment as an alternative to the death penalty and reducing the number of crimes punished by the death penalty," she said. "Those are all positive signs, but in the end, if they are still shooting people, those other changes don't count very much."
Executed without meeting their families
McGill said that Zhuk's mother came to visit her son on Friday, but was turned back at the gate by guards who said both men had been moved, and she should wait for notification from the court. The mother returned on Monday only to be informed by a prison guard that both men, who had shared the same cell, had been shot.
There has recently been a lot of pressure on Belarus to abolish the death sentence, McGill said. The Council of Europe has offered to reinstate Belarus' special guest status if it places a moratorium on the death penalty as a step towards the complete abolition of capital punishment. The previous status was withdrawn in 1997 after Minsk was seen as having fallen short in advancing democracy and human rights.
"Possibly, they wanted to get these men out of the way in order to clear the field to declare a moratorium," McGill suspected. She believes this happened in Ukraine when that country joined the Council of Europe, which oversees human rights standards in its 47 member states.
"Ukraine abolished the death penalty, but they executed a lot of people before they made the final declaration of a moratorium."
db/AFP/KNA
Editor: Ben Knight