Kazakhstan abolishes the death penalty

 

Kazakhstan has abolished the death penalty after a moratorium on executions in force for nearly 20 years in this authoritarian Central Asian country, the presidency said on Saturday (January 2nd). According to a notice posted on his official website, Head of State Kassym-Jomart Tokayev signed the ratification of the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

This text, ratified last year by the Kazakh Parliament, obliges its signatories to abolish the death penalty within their borders. Executions had been suspended in Kazakhstan since 2003. Courts nevertheless continued to sentence defendants to death for exceptional crimes, including those judged to be terrorism.

Life imprisonment

A man who killed eight police officers and two civilians during carnage in the country’s largest city, Almaty, in 2016, was sentenced to death. This sentence is now converted into a life sentence.

Four times the size of France, Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic, has 18 million inhabitants. In the former USSR, only Belarus continues to apply the death penalty regularly. Russia abolished it de facto, without explicitly banning it.

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