Controversy over suspension of death penalty

"A man raped his own mother, and then killed her. To hide the traces, he decided to burn the corpse," Sharifmat Rajapov, a judge from Tajikistan's southern Khatlon province, told IRIN, recalling a case he had recently presided over. The judge recounted the story to support his argument that the country should scrap a controversial moratorium on the death penalty that came into force in July this year. "Now people are not afraid of anything. Earlier, fear of the death penalty constrained them somehow. Now that the moratorium on capital punishment has been declared, this will untie the hands of criminals." Lilia Yaharieva, human rights officer and legal adviser at the UN bureau for peace-building, disagrees. She believes that there is no place for the death penalty in a civilised society. "It has already been proved many times that the death penalty cannot serve as a deterrent," she told IRIN. "When someone is going to commit a crime, as a rule they do not think of the consequences." Yaharieva believes the moratorium on the death penalty is an opportunity to prevent miscarriages of justice. A Russian mass murderer, known as Chikatilo, killed and dismembered about 70 women. By the time he was caught, two people had been executed after having been found guilty of the crimes committed by Chikatilo. "This is one of the steps undertaken by the government of Tajikistan on the humanisation of criminal legislation," Alikhon Rakhmonov, the Tajik deputy justice minister, told IRIN. The decision to call a halt to capital punishment was preceded by discussion in the media and society as a whole. "About three years ago, there were debates in Tajikistan about whether Tajik society was ready for the death penalty moratorium or not," Riccardo Lepri, a human rights adviser with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) based in the Tajik capital Dushanbe, said. That discussion followed an international conference organised by the OSCE in December 2001 in Dushanbe. After the conference, participants submitted a number of recommendations to the Tajik authorities on the liberalisation of criminal law. According to Lepri, the law that brought in the moratorium did not stipulate the period of suspension. "The moratorium is termless; it does not specify how long the suspension of the death penalty will continue." Representatives of some Tajik NGOs are concerned about this in the wake of growing terrorist attacks in the region. "We have concerns that the moratorium could be cancelled at any moment," Nigina Bakhrieva, head of the National Human Rights and Law Observance Bureau, said. "After a series of terrorist acts in Russia, people there started considering whether it was time to cancel the death penalty moratorium here in Tajikistan." Some argue that the death penalty is preferable to a lifetime spent in a Tajik jail - where conditions are often very poor. "Rumours say that prisoners simply die of hunger and diseases in our inhumane jails," Abdullo Latipov, a 56-year-old inhabitant of Dushanbe, says. Many prisoners are known to have died from malnutrition and disease while serving sentences in the nation's jails. "Some of the lucky ones who are brought food by their well-to-do relatives at least once a week are able to survive somehow. As for the others, they simply die like flies," one former convict, recently released after a five-year sentence for theft, told IRIN. IRIN asked Deputy Justice Minister Rakhmonov under what conditions prisoners are kept and whether prison constituted a humane alternative to the death penalty. "The prisons and corrective facilities of Tajikistan are indeed overcrowded. At current capacity, they are able to admit 6,000 prisoners. However, at present, more than 9,000 prisoners are serving their terms in corrective facilities. Those sentenced to the death penalty, who are under the moratorium, are serving their 25 years of imprisonment in Kurgan Tyube prison." The minister also admitted that prisons were breeding grounds for disease. "Last year prisoners underwent medical examinations with the support of international organisations," Rakhmonov said. "The examinations revealed more than 1,500 prisoners infected with tuberculosis, including 750 convicts with the open form of the disease."