Russia | The Duma prepared to restore the death penalty

Russian a short and remarkable episode was seen in the Duma, the lower house of the Parliament, on Wednesday, when the Duma decided to return a legal initiative made 22 years ago back to its drafters. The newspaper tells about it Appeal.

It’s the president Vladimir Putin at the beginning of the first presidential term in 2001, the legislative initiative to abolish the death penalty. The death penalty law inherited from the Soviet Criminal Code was and is still in force, although no one has been executed since 1996.

The death penalty ended when the president Boris Yeltsin prohibited their implementation by its own decree. The last criminal to be executed in Russia was a serial killer and rapist from Moscow Sergey Golovkinwho received the death sentence in August 1996 for the murder of a total of eleven 10-16-year-old boys.

The last nail in the coffin for executions came in 1999, when the Russian Constitutional Court suspended the death penalty article after Russia joined the Council of Europe sitting in Strasbourg. Russia was expelled from this intergovernmental cooperation and human rights organization in March of last year.

Initiative the removal of the death penalty from the criminal code was done in 2001 by the MPs of the party called Oikeistovoimei liitto. The initiative was transferred to the working group, to which the web magazine Medusa included 30 members. The most famous liberal democrats in Russian politics were present.

After Putin came to power, the initiative was buried in the chambers of the Duma and the liberal parties remained below the vote threshold. The Union of Right-Wing Forces was dissolved in 2008.

With Wednesday’s decision, the legal initiative, which has been on the shelf for 22 years, will be returned to these drafters. However, in addition to the legal initiative, many of its authors are also in the grave: Yegor Gaidar died 2009, Boris Nemtsov was murdered in 2015.

Only one of the members of the preparatory working group is sitting in the current Duma, currently representing the ruling party United Russia Pavel Krasheninnikov. He will thus in all probability become the undertaker of European legislation, who can leave the legal initiative banning the death penalty in his own filing cabinet as a memory of the past.

Puller according to the experts interviewed, the prohibition of the death penalty may have had to be imposed by the speaker of the Duma Vyacheslav Volodin subject to disciplinary action. This spring, Volodin has ordered the Duma’s committees to clean up old legislative initiatives.

Another option is for the old initiative to be cleared out of the way for the new death penalty law.

“When the leaders start working on a law, they usually clear the way of the laws on the same subject that are lying in the Duma”, member of the Moscow City Council, opposition politician Boris Nadezhdin comment to Vedomosti.

Nadeždin was a member of the 2001 liberal legal working group.

Fair Leader of the Russia party Sergei Mironov proposed before Easter to the Russian Constitutional Court that the freeze or moratorium on the death penalty be removed due to, among other things, “the geopolitical situation and the collective anti-Russian and hostile activities of the West”. The news agency reported about it Tass.

Reinstating the death penalty has been on Mironov’s agenda before. Ruling party Member of Parliament of United Russia Oleg Morozov in turn announced that he agreed with Mironov.

Putin’s press chief Dmitry Peskov said after Mironov’s proposal that the issue has not been discussed in the Kremlin.

Correction 15.4. 12:49 p.m.: The Council of Europe is an intergovernmental cooperation and human rights organization, not a human rights court.