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On the Use of Death Penalty in the Republic of Belarus
On
November 4, 2003 the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Belarus decided
to institute legal proceedings on the issue “On compliance of the articles
of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus envisaging death penalty as
punishment with the Constitution of the Republic of Belarus and
international treaties of the Republic of Belarus”.
The Republic of Belarus is not a party either to the Second Optional
Protocol to the International Pact on Civil and Political Rights or to
Protocols 6 and 13 to the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights and
Fundamental Freedoms, which envisage the abolition of death penalty. The
Republic of Belarus is one of the states maintaining the use of death
penalty. According to Article 59 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of
Belarus of 1999 the use of death penalty (execution) is allowed as an
extraordinary measure of punishment for certain very grave crimes connected
with premeditated murder under aggravating circumstances. The use of death
penalty is motivated in all cases in the verdict on the basis of established
circumstances of the committed crime and of the data exhaustively
characterizing the accused, since the law allows but not demands the use of
extraordinary measure of punishment for committing a very grave crime. Here,
death penalty can be used only when its necessity is stipulated by special
circumstances aggravating responsibility and also, by extraordinary danger
of the person who committed a very grave crime. Each specific case on
execution is considered separately. It should be noted that, compared with
the previous Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus of 1960 the Criminal
Code of the Republic of Belarus of 1999 reduces considerably the number of
corpus delicti punishable by death penalty and broadens the list of persons
who cannot be punished by death penalty. Under Article 59 of the Criminal
Code, this category includes those under 18 years of age, women and men 65
years or older as of the date of the verdict. If the circumstances limiting
the use of death penalty are established, capital punishment is replaced by
other punishment mentioned in this Article (as a rule, deprivation of
liberty).
At present, wide variety of sanctions allows the court of law to have
considerable degree of freedom in choosing the punishment. According to the
1999 Criminal Code of the Republic of Belarus, death penalty as an
alternative punishment can be used when the following crimes have been
committed:
1. Launching or conducting aggressive war (part II of Article 122);
2. Murder of a representative of a foreign state or international
organization in order to provoke international complications or war (part II
of Article 124);
3. International terrorism (Article 126);
4. Genocide (Article 127);
5. Crimes against security of humankind (Article 128);
6. Use of weapons of mass destruction prohibited under international
treaties of the Republic of Belarus (Article 134);
7. Violation of war laws and usage (part III of Article 135);
8. Murder under aggravating circumstances (part II of Article 139);
9. Terrorism (part III of Article 289);
10. High treason connected with murder (part II of Article 356);
11. Conspiracy to seize state power (part III of Article 357);
12. Terrorist act (Article 359);
13. Sabotage (part II of Article 360);
14. Murder of a policeman (Article 362).
Court practice and court statistics demonstrate that, in the actual use of
death penalty in the Republic of Belarus, there is a steady trend towards
decreased number of those sentenced to death penalty. On the whole, in
reality, capital punishment has been used only for premeditated murder under
aggravated circumstances.
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