Mikalai Charhinets: I would rather keep capital punishment

The politician, general Mikalai Charhinets (Cherginets) has expressed his opinion on demands of the Council of Europe to the Belarusian authorities.

In an interview to Radio Svaboda general Charhinets spoke about whether our country should ban capital punishment. As we have informed, on June 23 the PACE adopted a resolution according to which the Belarusian “parliament” is to be granted a special guest status only after imposing a moratorium on the execution of the death penalty.

“I have seen too many cruel murders, such as rapes and murders of 4-5 year-old girls, corpse dissections,” Charhinets said. “I would keep [this punishment] for this category. If we won’t response to such crimes harshly, they would grow. I won’t use capital punishment to any economic crimes… I would keep it only for one crime, for abuse and cruel murders of children, as not a single mother would find a justification to a murderer”.

Belarus understands that Europe has chosen the way to ban such a dreadful penalty as capital punishment. The authorities are trying to take this with attention and make steps to come to that at last.

We are held back by the fact that the capital punishment was introduced by a decision of a referendum. And it should be banned by a referendum as well.

That is why we have chosen such a way. We reduced a number of articles for which this punishment is envisaged. Unfortunately, so far we are sure that we won’t receive majority of votes in a referendum on full abolition of capital punishment. Tat is why we should do the following: to try to reduce the number of cases when such court decision is adopted. A moratorium should gradually be imposed on execution of this penalty.

And the third thing is public awareness efforts, in order to make such a proposal real, to carryout a referendum and solve this question. Such a logical sequence of questions is the most acceptable for Belarus.”

It should be noted that representatives of international institutions such as Amnesty International stated many times that a referendum is not needed to abolish capital punishment.

Thus, in a recent interview to BelaPAN Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe Maud de Boer-Buquicchio stated that “capital punishment abolishment is not an issue for a referendum, but of showing a political will by the authorities”.