A moratorium on executions had been in force for almost twenty years in the country.
Le Monde avec AFP
Under the presidency of Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Kazakhstan continues to open up slowly: the country abolished, on Saturday January 2, the death penalty while a moratorium on executions had been in force for nearly twenty years .
A colossal advance in this country which does not yet know any political opposition. The Head of State announced in a notice published on the official website of Kazakhstan that he had ratified the second optional protocol relating to the international pact on civil and political rights, adopted in 1966 by the General Assembly of the United Nations . Already ratified last year by the Kazakh Parliament, this text obliges the signatories to abolish the death penalty within their borders.
The consequences of a twenty-year moratorium
While executions had been suspended in Kazakhstan since 2003, courts nevertheless continued to sentence defendants to death for exceptional crimes, in particular those relating to terrorism. Such sentences will henceforth be converted into life imprisonment.
Kazakhstan has thus extended the list of former Soviet republics to abolish the death penalty. Today, only Belarus continues to apply it regularly while Russia has abolished it de facto, without explicitly banning it.