Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Lome (Agenzia Fides) – Togo has joined the other countries who have decided to outlaw the death penalty. On December 13, the government in Lome announced a law abolishing capital punishment.
“The country's choice to establish a wholesome justice that limits judicial errors, corrects, educates, and guarantees the rights of the human person, is no longer compatible with a penal code that still calls for the death penalty, recognizing the law as the absolute power and whose consequences are irremediable,” says the statement from the Council of Ministers in Togo, in anticipation of the decree abolishing capital punishment. “The abolition of the death penalty, considered a humiliating, degrading, and cruel punishment by the international community that respects human rights which we all have, has entered into the collective conscience of the people of Togo after 30 years of moratorium, although it continued to be present in the penal code,” reads a declaration of the Togolese government.
“Togo, a country with whom Sant'Egidio maintains close ties and in which it has been working recently on the process of reconciliation, thus becomes the 17th African state without a death penalty,” a statement from the Community of Sant' Egidio (which was sent to Agenzia Fides). The statement also recalls that “the Human Rights Commission of the African Union approved a resolution asking all African states to ban the death penalty, in early December in Abuja, Nigeria.”
“The Community of Sant'Egidio is pleased to hear these two pieces of good news that confirm Africa's progress in abolition, recalling the daily efforts made in the African communities to abolish capital punishment, for a culture of life and for the improvement of the dramatic life conditions of the imprisoned.”
“With the adoption of the resolution, the African Union unites itself to the global position and sends a clear sign to the international community of their desire to support the moratorium of the UN that was voted on last year and renewed with greater force by the Human Rights Commission just weeks ago.”
“The community recalls the relevance of the recent encounters promoted by the African Ministers of Justice, that have laid a firm and operative basis leading to a complete abolition of the death penalty in Africa, of which the African Union's resolution represents an especially significant victory,” the statement from Sant’Egidio said. (LM) (Agenzia Fides 16/12/2008)
