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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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Kazakhstan's Parliament Ratifies International Protocol To Abolish Death Penalty

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SULTAN, December 29 (Sputnik) - The upper house of Kazakhstan's parliament has ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which represents a formal commitment to abolish the death penalty, a Sputnik correspondent has reported.

In late September, Kazakhstan's permanent envoy to the United Nations, Kairat Umarov signed the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which commits signatory nations to abolish the death penalty. The document was later approved by the lower house of the country's parliament.

"The signatory countries undertake the following obligations: not to use the death penalty and to take all necessary measures to abolish the death penalty within their jurisdiction.

The only exception is possible in the case of a legal clause on the use of the death penalty in wartime. Kazakhstan intends to use the clause stipulated by the convention providing for the use of the death penalty. Kazakhstan ... reserves the right to use the death penalty in wartime after founding [someone] guilty of particularly grave crimes of a military nature," Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tleuberdi said in the upper house.

The document is now to be signed by the country's president.

In 2003, the first president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, signed a decree introducing a moratorium on the death penalty in the country. 

The decree suspended the execution of all death sentences but did not prohibit the courts from passing death sentences. 

Life imprisonment was introduced in Kazakhstan in 2004 as an alternative punishment.

Source: urdupoint.com, Staff, December 29, 2020


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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
Location: Kazakhstan
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