Capital punishment

It's a thorny issue, or so the polls would suggest. Recent surveys say that up to 80 percent of Russians are in favor of a return to state-ordered execution, a practise which has been kept at bay for the past decade by a legally-binding document.

The 1999 moratorium on the death penalty was a condition for Russia to become a member of the Council of Europe. And although the Council would have preferred out-and-out abolition, it agreed to the suspension while waiting for Moscow to commit to ratifying a protocol which would completely outlaw capital punishment.

This, the Russian Federation has so far failed to do.

What's more, the constitutional court attached a condition of its own to the moratorium. It stated that no tribunal in Russia would be allowed to hand down a death sentence until such time as jury trial - abolished in 1917 by the Bolsheviks - had been introduced in all regions of the federation.

With Chechnya, which is currently the only remaining republic not to use jurors, poised to adopt the practise in a few weeks time, Russia has a decision to make. It can opt to extend the moratorium, reintroduce the death penalty or do away with it once and for all.

Mixed opinions

Which way the court will decide is anything but clear. Although many officials and experts addressing the hearings earlier this week spoke out against a resumption of judicial killings, some made cases in favor.

The Ria Novosti news agency reported Communist lawmaker Vadim Solovyav as saying the abolition of capital punishment could "contribute to the growth of criminality in Russia." And he is not the only one to think that way.

But that line of argument holds little sway with the abolitionists. Friedericke Behr, Amnesty International researcher on Russia said such thinking is poorly-informed. "Research in many countries has shown that having a death penalty makes no difference to crime rates," she told Deutsche Welle.

Be that as it may, President Dmitry Medvedev does not appear to be in a hurry to do away with it. During Monday's hearings, his representative to the constitutional court, Mikhail Krotov, said the Kremlin supported "a stage-by-stage abolition of capital punishment."

Exactly what that means is unlikely to be revealed before the court rules afresh in the coming weeks. But the sheer fact that such shrouded statements are being thrown about is cause enough for concern, says Allison Gill, Director of Human Rights Watch Russia.

"The signal is that Russia is still holding back from putting itself in with the requirements of the Council of Europe," Gill told Deutsche Welle.

And that, she believes, stems from a reflex among Russian policy-makers to want to sign up to international and European institutions without wanting to fully commit to them. "I think there is an instinct on the part of certain Russian politicians to maintain a position of Russian exceptionalism," she said.

Different is not always good

Only being different on this particular issue could have massive implications for Moscow's relationship with the Council of Europe. Russia is the only country which has not ratified protocol 6 - the abolition of the death penalty - and has frequently cited public opinion as the reason.

But in a country not renowned for bowing to public pressure, such reasoning doesn't really resonate. "If the government has a political will to abolish the death penalty," Gill said, "they could make a convincing case to the Russian public."

At present the polls claim one in eight Russians would back the eye-for-an-eye way of thinking. Yet Friederike Behr says surveys on capital punishment are often manipulated from the outset.

"It's all in the way you ask the questions," she said, adding that the mention of publicly exposed vicious crime motivates the public to grant pollsters the kind of statistics they have been publishing in the past weeks.

Paradox polls

Allison Gill agrees that such surveys cannot be taken as gospel, not least because the same public that flies the flag for state-ordered execution is deeply critical of the system which passes the sentences.

"On the one hand, Russians might be in the majority in being pro-death penalty, but on the other hand they also mistrust their own law enforcement system and their courts," Gill said. "They don't think they're going to get a fair hearing."

And some clearly don't. As Behr points out, Russia has got it wrong on many occasions. "People have been sentenced to death and have been executed and then found to be not guilty," she said. "There are people here who were on death row when the moratorium was introduced and who were then released later on because they were found to be innocent."

It's the age-old argument which applies to any state that still sentences its criminals to death, but it seems particularly pertinent in a country where so many people have so little faith in the justice system. As Allison Gill asks "how can that justice system be responsible for handing out the ultimate penalty?"

Author: Tamsin Walker
Editor: Rob Mudge