Europe was Execution-Free in 2009

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

LONDON, March 29, 2010
Europe was Execution-Free in 2009
Amnesty International Critiques China for Refusing to Say How Many Prisoners the Country Puts to Death

(AP) Europe had its first year without executions in 2009, human rights group Amnesty International said Tuesday. But the London-based organization said the spell was recently broken by the execution of two men in Belarus - an indication of the challenges the group faces as it fights to abolish capital punishment.

Amnesty International has been tracking executions internationally since 1980, although their figures don't include extra-judicial killings or the casualties of war. Western European countries such as France, Britain and Germany abolished the death penalties in the years following World War II, and abolition spread rapidly through Eastern Europe with the collapse of Iron Curtain.

Many former Soviet satellites banned capital punishment in the 1980s and '90s. Russia and Ukraine have not executed anyone more than a decade. Amnesty said that Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan have executed about 130 people between them over the past 10 years, but since 2006 Belarus has been the only European state to carry out death sentences.

The death penalty is "on its way out," according to Amnesty's interim Secretary General Claudio Cordone, before acknowledging that countries such as Belarus were a "hard core" where the practice would likely linger for some time.



Read more: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/29/world/main6345197.shtml

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

1. Well, gee, then Belarus MUST be the best place to live in Europe, right?

Right, DP defenders?

[rpannier]

3. You didn't know

Belarus is the go-to place in Europe.

I mean, it's the only dictatorship left in Europe

Who wouldn't want to live in a repressive, police state?

[MichaelHarris]

2. Wonder

what 1 million gun toting violent Americans would do if we sent them over there? Think Europe would still be death penalty free?

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

4. Little known fact about the European Union

You can't join if you have the death penalty. A few Eastern countries abolished it as a precondition for joining. :thumbsup:

[lonestarnot]

5. Yeah.

And how much money did they save?

[DFW]

6. To say that Russia has abolished it is misleading

That's only the official version. Journalists who get too close to official corruption are systematically
executed. It's just that it is not carried out by ritual inside a prison by people in state uniforms. It is
carried out by trained killers who, despite an efficient state security service, never seem to get caught when
the killing serves the government's purpose. Look up Anna Politovskaya, although she is only one the most famous
of the post-communism unofficial executions.

[Jkid]

7. "despite an efficient state security service"

How efficient is Russia's state security service?

[DFW]

9. They're still pretty good

Putin is ex-KGB and made sure the FSB still served him well domestically. The main difference is they're no longer
interested in empire-building. Within the RF, they are still a force to be reckoned with.

[Jkid]

11. What threats they took care of in the RF recently?

[TheLastMohican]

8. Conspiracy theory really.

Anna Politkovskaya had many relations with a Chechen mob, and actually praised them on quite a few occasions. She was an american citizen writing unverified garbage about Russia on more then few occasions and even received some kind of a prize for journo work from Condoleeza Rice. That tells me everything I need to know.
Now imagine a Russian citizen writing unverified garbage about G.W.Bush or Barack Obama governments and not getting kiss arse kicked out of US of A?

[DFW]

10. She was not kicked out, she was murdered, and she also had Russian citizenship. Slight difference

She had American citizenship because she was born in New York. Her parents worked at the Soviet Ukranian
delegation at the UN. She grew up in the Soviet Union, and went to MGU, graduating in 1980. Sure, she was
born in NY, but she returned and grew up as a Soviet citizen. Calling her an American and a foreigner living
in Russia is about as accurate as a Fox report on the size of a Teabagger rally.

Plus, she was not a unique example. She was only one of several members of the press who got too close
to corruption at high levels. One of our best friends was station chief for West German radio news in
Moscow for years, and knows/knew plenty of the players and had inside info not reported in the press.

He said that it is an unpublished fact of life there that if a journalist gets too close to reporting
facts that would embarrass high government officials, they get a warning, and then get shot if that
warning is not heeded. I was with him in Moscow while one of these so-called "unsolved killings" took
place up in SPB. The militsiya basically said tsk tsk, and never even bothered to say they were or
weren't making progress in solving the crime.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

12. Assassinations

are not executions.

[DFW]

13. If they are ordered by state organs, they're the same.

Whether it is carried out in a prison by thugs in uniform or in a darkened alley by thugs out of uniform, if
it's state ordered and organized, then as far as I'm concerned, it's an execution. Same goes for an Ohio election
official who mysteriously dies when about to spill the beans on how the State was illegally declared for Bush.
It seems pretty clear to me that he was removed by Cheneybush thugs, and the fact that it wasn't inside the walls
of a prison doesn't mean that it wasn't a state organized execution.