“Abolition now! Abolition now!”

Hundreds of human rights campaigners from countries across the world chanted this as they marched on the streets of Brussels, calling for the universal end to capital punishment.

The participants of the rally, which was held recently in Belgium’s capital as part of the closing event for the seventh World Congress against the Death Penalty, held up a large banner emblazoned with the words “Say No to the Death Penalty”.

Fatia Maulidyanti, an activist from the Jakarta-based Comission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), said she was happy to take part in the rally and to see that calls on countries to abolish death penalty were mounting.

“Europe has the strongest abolitionist movement compared to some countries in other regions, such as Africa, the United States and Asia, where public support for abolition is still not strong enough,” Fatia told The Jakarta Post.

European countries, except for Belarus, are among 146 countries and territories in the world that have abolished capital punishment either by law or in practice as of last year.

At least 52 states across the globe, including Indonesia, still retain the death penalty, mainly for drug offenses, murder and terrorism.

“[Without public support] some governments appear to maintain that there is still no urgency for them to impose a moratorium or to abolish the death penalty,” Fatia added.

During the congress — which was organized by France-based human rights group Together against the Death Penalty (ECPM) — international organizations, prominent leaders and activists stepped up their efforts and calls for more countries to join the list of abolitionist states.

Participants of the congress applauded what they called a positive trend toward universal abolition, citing a United Nations General Assembly resolution in December, which recorded that 121 countries voted in favor of a death penalty moratorium, up from 117 in 2016 — the highest number ever recorded on the issue.

Harm Reduction International’s (HRI) latest global report revealed that executions for drug offenses, which accounted for nearly 40 percent of executions globally over the past decade, have fallen from 755 to 91 between 2015 and last year, mainly triggered by judicial reforms in Iran in 2017 that resulted in the drop of executions.

Although this was a positive development, many countries still needed to start recognizing that the death penalty did not deter crimes, including those related to drugs, HRI human rights analyst Giada Girelli said.

At least 35 countries still implemented the death penalty to punish drug offenders and currently, about 7,000 people were on death row for drug-related crimes across the globe, the report said.

“[Some] countries in the world see drugs as an issue and they struggle to find a way to respond […] with the tools that they have and that is the death penalty. But it doesn’t work,” Girelli told the Post.

“Despite the [capital punishment] there are still a lot of drug trafficking and drug users,” she said. “Governments should start considering that there are other approaches and move [to abolish the death penalty].”

Pope Francis, who last year announced the revision of the catechism of the Catholic Church declaring the death penalty “inadmissible”, also welcomed the global trend toward abolition as he argued that capital punishment was a grave violation of the right to life of each person.

“The dignity of the person is not lost even when they have committed the worst of crimes. No one can be killed and deprived of the opportunity to embrace the community they wounded and made to suffer,” he said.

In the final declaration adopted at the congress, the participants called for retentionist countries to make concrete efforts in reducing the scope of the death penalty and move toward abolition by implementing a moratorium on death sentences and executions.

Kevin Miguel Rivera-Medina, the president of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, relayed concerns that the death penalty across the globe mainly impacted minority groups or those from disadvantaged socioeconomic background or gender-based discrimination.

“Conditions on death row [also] violate human dignity and are a cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment,” he said while reading out the declaration.

The participants also welcomed the commitments relayed by some African countries participating in the congress, namely Gambia, the Republic of Congo, Guinea, Burkina Faso and Morocco, to take further steps to abolish the death penalty.

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