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Shooting Moratorium Yeltsin Constitutional Court of Russia Council of Europe
Shooting Moratorium Yeltsin Constitutional Court of Russia Council of Europe
with the only legal method being shooting. There exists both an implicit moratorium established by
the President Yeltsin in 1996, and an explicit one, established by the Constitutional Court of
Russia in 1999 and which was most recently reaffirmed in 2009. Russia has not executed anyone
since 1996, and the regulations of the Council of Europe prohibit it from doing so at any time in the
future. However, the death penalty still remains codified.
Article 20 of the Russian Constitution states that everyone has the right to life, and that "until its
abolition, death penalty may only be passed for the most serious crimes against human life."
Additionally, all such sentences require jury trial. The inclusion of the abolition wording has been
interpreted by some as a requirement that the death penalty be abolished at some point in the future.
The current Penal Code permits death penalty for five crimes:
No crime has a mandatory death sentence; each of the five sections mentioned above also permit a
sentence of life imprisonment as well as a prison term of not less than eight or 12 (depending on
crime) nor more than twenty, years. Moreover, men under the age of 18 or above the age of 65 as of
the time crime was committed, and all women, are not eligible for a death sentence. [2]
a criminal sentence. We see the death penalty as a clear violation of the Universal Declaration of Human
Right, and calls for a moratorium on capital punishment on a global scale