Death sentence. For 17 years the issue of abolition of capital punishment can not be solved in Tajikistan

In the early 1990s, independent Tajikistan inherited all of its legislation from the former Soviet state, including the death penalty. Then, of course, the legislation was modified and amended to adjust it to the new realities.

The supreme punishment in years of civil war (the beginning of the 90s) and up to 2004 was applied to 16 articles of the Criminal code of Tajikistan. Then the number of articles where the death penalty is applied was reduced to five:

Article 104 of the Criminal Code “Murder”,

Article 399 of the Criminal Code “Biocide”,

Article 398 of the Criminal Code “Genocide”,

Article 179 of the Criminal Code “Terrorism”,

Article 138 of the Criminal “Rape”.

At the same time, capital punishment was abolished for women, teenagers, and the elderly. And in 2004 the law “About the suspension of application of the death penalty in the Republic of Tajikistan” was accepted and replaced it with imprisonment for the term from 25 years and above.

The death penalty is also listed in Article 18 of the country’s Constitution, which notes:

“Everyone has the right to life. No one may be deprived of life except by the sentence of a court for an especially grave crime.

By the way, officials use this article of the Constitution to excuse the fact that the death penalty can’t be abolished. After all, in order to do that, a nationwide referendum is needed. However, such a referendum was held in May 2016, and among the 41 amendments put to the vote, there was nothing about the abolition of capital punishment.

Up until 2004, Tajikistan ranked first among OSCE participating states in terms of the number of death sentences imposed per population. These conclusions are based on unofficial data, as official data are classified.

According to the monitoring of the public organization “Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law” conducted in 2004, 133 death sentences were executed in Tajikistan between 2001 and 2003, with the majority in 2001 – 68 death sentences.

The death penalty in Tajikistan was carried out by firing squad.

The number of people sentenced to death in Tajikistan, their burial places, and information about the executors of the death penalty have not been disclosed to this day.

A moratorium on the death penalty in Tajikistan was introduced as a result of a dialogue between human rights organizations and the government. The main argument of human rights activists is that the death penalty is not a tool to help fight crime, and no legal system in the world is immune to judicial errors.

Independent Tajikistan in the early 2000s gradually recovered from the effects of the civil war and began cooperating with many international human rights organizations. The country has adopted and ratified international human rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Therefore, the authorities could not ignore the requirements of international documents, the main of which states that human life is inviolable, everyone has the right to life and no one can be intentionally deprived of life.

Human rights organizations are convinced that it does not. They say that crime rates are influenced by many factors, from poverty and lack of education to the mental disabilities of the offender, but not by the death penalty.

Besides, in the world, there are many stories of miscarriages of justice when after the execution it turned out that an innocent person had been executed. Such cases have also been recorded in the United States and Russia.

In 1949, Timothy Evans was hanged in the United States for the murder of his pregnant wife and two-year-old daughter. Only four years later, serial killer John Christie, who had testified at Evans’ trial in the past, confessed to the murder. He was hanged, and Timothy Evans was posthumously rehabilitated. This is one of the most powerful stories in the death penalty debate.

By imposing a moratorium on the death penalty, Tajikistan pledged to consider signing and ratifying the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, an international treaty aimed at abolishing the death penalty, in subsequent years. However, this has not happened in the last 17 years.

Russia, Belarus, and Tajikistan are the only European and Central Asian countries that have not yet signed or ratified the Second Optional Protocol.

In an interview with CABAR.asia, Nigina Bakhrieva, head of the “Notabene” Public Foundation, noted that the delay in abolishing the death penalty is often justified by the fact that the population is not ready for it and the majority is in favor of capital punishment.

She is confident that the authorities can lift the moratorium at any time on legitimate grounds and reintroduce the exceptional measure of punishment.

“Tajikistan is the last country in Central Asia that hasn’t even signed this protocol yet. And, in my opinion, this is very bad, because the death penalty can become a subject of political manipulation. There is already an international consensus in international law that the death penalty is a violation of fundamental human rights,” she says.