PThe chairman of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin did not rule out lifting the moratorium on the death penalty in Russia. According to Zorkin, the issue of the use of the death penalty cannot be closed as long as there is a practice of premeditated murders. He suggested that capital punishment may be revived in Russia at a certain historical stage
Valery Zorkin
Chairman of the Constitutional Court (CC) Valery Zorkin did not rule out the possibility of lifting the moratorium on the death penalty in Russia. This is stated in his book “Constitutional Justice: Procedure and Meaning”, published on the court’s website. Attention was drawn to this by the “Merchant”.
“The fact that the Constitutional Court made a decision making it impossible to apply the death penalty in Russia at this historical stage of its development does not exclude the possibility of a return to this measure of punishment in the future,” Zorkin believes.
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The question of the use of capital punishment cannot be closed as long as there are premeditated murders, writes Zorkin. According to him, much depends on the general legal situation in Russia, on how far the country will be able to move forward in creating a “strong, self-confident law and order”. He called the moratorium on the death penalty introduced in the country “a concession, a departure from the requirements of the legal principle of equality”.
“I really hope that the departure made by our country from the law towards those moral and religious views that stand on the positions of principled rejection of the death penalty will be successful for Russia,” the book says.
In the USSR and Russia, until the mid-1990s, courts imposed the death penalty for various criminal offenses – from treason and banditry to desertion. The moratorium on it appeared in 1997, when Russia joined the Council of Europe and signed the protocol to the Convention on the Protection of Human Rights on the abolition of death sentences in peacetime. The Protocol has not been ratified, but from that moment the death penalty is prohibited in Russia according to the Vienna Convention. De facto, the death penalty has not been applied in the country since 1996, while there is such a concept in the Criminal Code.
In 1999 and 2009, the Constitutional Court by its decisions confirmed the moratorium on the death penalty. In May of this year, Andrei Klishas, Chairman of the Federation Council Committee on Constitutional Legislation, announced the impossibility of lifting the moratorium. As the senator pointed out, the Constitutional Court explained that stable guarantees of the human right not to be subjected to such punishment have been formed in Russia.
In 2017, the head of the Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, said that it was possible to revive the death penalty only after a referendum.
In March 2021, VTsIOM-Sputnik conducted a study in which it invited Russians to answer the question of what laws they introduced or repealed at the place of the presidential adviser. 2% of respondents chose the abolition of the moratorium on the death penalty. 1.6 thousand people aged 18 and over participated in the survey.
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