The Council of the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Parliament, has decided to return the bill proposing the exclusion of the death penalty from the Russian Criminal Code to its authors. As the Vedomosti newspaper noted, this information appeared in the Duma database on Wednesday.
The death penalty still exists in Russian law but is not applied due to a moratorium introduced in 1997.
A bill to remove capital punishment from the Criminal Code altogether was introduced into the Duma in 2001. The initiative was authored by deputies from the Union of Right Forces, including opposition activist Boris Nemtsov, who was murdered in 2015, economic shock therapy architect Egor Gaidar, who died in 2009, and politician Irina Khakamada.
Elena Mizulina, now known for backing controversial conservative laws, was originally among the authors of the bill, but she withdrew her signature in 2014.
The only author who is still a Duma member is Pavel Krasheninnikov, head of the Constitutional Committee. He is now a member of the ruling United Russia party.
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, there have been more and more calls in Russia to bring back the death penalty. Government officials mentioned the idea once again after the explosion in the centre of St. Petersburg which killed pro-war “war correspondent” Vladlen Tatarsky.
Sergey Mironov, head of the Just Russia faction in parliament, suggested that Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin “consider revising the position” on capital punishment. “Given the terrorist attacks by Ukrainian Nazis, we need to return the death penalty for terrorists and their accomplices”, he wrote.
United Russia lawmaker Oleg Morozov said that the Constitutional Court’s position on the death penalty “may be clarified due to the changing international situation and the degradation of the international legal system”.
“You do not negotiate with terrorists. You hunt them down like rabid dogs with poisonous saliva flowing from their mouths”, Dmitry Medvedev, ex-president and current Deputy Chairman of the Security Council, wrote. He has suggested lifting the moratorium on the death penalty before.
