Russian upper house speaker against death penalty for terrorists
31.03.2010
The speaker of the upper house of the Russian parliament slammed on Wednesday proposals to reinstate the death penalty for terrorists.
Sergei Mironov's comments came just two days after two deadly suicide bombings hit the Moscow metro, killing at least 39 people and injuring dozens more.
"I am negative about calling off a moratorium on the death penalty," Mironov said.
He said that terrorists should receive life behind bars and "rot in prison and die bad deaths."
Mironov also refuted speculation that the upper house had set up a working group to develop amendments to the criminal law stipulating the death penalty for terrorists.
The chairman of the Federation Council's Committee on Legal and Juridical Issues, Anatoly Lyskov, said on Tuesday his committee was working on a draft law which would introduce death penalty for terrorists.
The current law provides for life imprisonment for terrorist acts leading to the death of a single individual. The new amendments would have provided for capital punishment for staging a terrorist attack that results in multiple losses of life.
It is unclear how an amendment stipulating the death penalty for such crimes would correlate with a moratorium on the death penalty prolonged in November 2009 by the Russian Constitutional Court.
The death penalty was de-facto abolished in Russia in 1996. The country imposed the moratorium after it joined the Council of Europe that year and signed the European Convention on Human Rights, but it has not ratified the document yet.