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Kazakhstan abolished the death penalty, making permanent a nearly two-decade freeze on capital punishment in the authoritarian Central Asian country.

Highlights

• President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev had signed off on parliamentary ratification of the Second Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights — a document that commits signatories to the abolition of capital punishment.
  
• Executions were paused in Kazakhstan from 2003 but courts continued to sentence convicts to death in exceptional circumstances, including for crimes deemed acts of terror.
• Ruslan Kulekbayev, a lone gunman who killed eight policemen and two civilians during a rampage in Kazakhstan’s largest city Almaty in 2016, was among the convicts set to be executed if the moratorium were lifted.

Second Optional Protocol

• In 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was adopted and entered into force in 1976. At the time 176 countries acceded to it.
• On December 15, 1989, the Second Optional Protocol was adopted to it which aimed at the abolition of capital punishment or the death penalty. The protocol came into force in 1991. 88 other nations, apart from Kazakhstan, are also members of the agreement.

The countries that sign the agreement take the following obligations:

• Not to apply the death penalty
• To take all the necessary measures for abolishing the death penalty within their jurisdiction
• The only exception to execute the death penalty will be allowed in the case of wartime.

Source: aljazeera