EU reaffirms opposition to death penalty

The European Union (EU) on Monday reaffirmed its worldwide opposition to the death penalty and expressed the commitment to advocate for the abolition of the practice.

At a press conference in Accra on Monday, Ambassador Claude Maerten, Head of the European Union delegation in Ghana who read a press statement issued in Brussels by the European Commission to mark the World and European Day against the Death Penalty, said the EU was committed to achieving universal abolition of the death penalty.

The release said the abolition of the death penalty was one of the main objectives of the EU’s human rights policy because the EU considered the death penalty as inhumane and a violation of human dignity, adding that the sentence was also not deterring violent crimes.

The release indicated that any capital punishment resulting from a miscarriage of justice and which no legal system could be immune to represented an irreversible loss of human life and should be abolished by all nations.

The growing support given to UN resolutions on the death penalty from 2007 to 2010 confirmed an increasing international trend against the death penalty, while at the same time acknowledging the growing number of countries which had done away with the death penalty, from 55 to 97 between 1993 and 2009, the release stated.

It said some 58 countries in the world still retained the death penalty and appealed to the Ghana Government to consider removing the death sentence from its statute books.

It condemned Belarus, the only European country that still applied capital punishment, and said the EU was supporting the UN’s recent resolution on the global moratorium on the issue of the death penalty, with a view to its complete abolition