The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area 4. Retentionist States BELARUS Belarus is the only country in Europe which continues to carry out the death penalty. Among the recommendations made to Belarus at the 2011 Human Dimension Implementation Meeting were to express political readiness to adopt a moratorium on the death penalty and respect its OSCE commitment to make information on the use of the death penalty publicly available. The Belarusian parliamentary working group on the death penalty, which was established in 2010, ceased its activities during the reporting period.27 While the government has expressed its intention to mould public opinion in favor of abolition, no such measures appear to have been taken this year.28 According to Nikolay Samoseiko, the chair of the working group on the death penalty, a moratorium could have been discussed had the terrorist attacks of April 2011 not occurred.29 In response to repeated calls for a moratorium, at an annual parliamentary address in May 2012, President Alexander Lukashenko suggested that the death penalty reflected the will of the Belarusian people and that a moratorium would not be possible while this was the case.30 He referred to a 1996 referendum, which revealed majority support for capital punishment. While subsequent opinion polls in 2000 and 2003 indicate majority support, results from a 2008 national poll, conducted by the Belarusian research centre NOVAK, showed that less than half of the respondents favored the death penalty, with almost 40 per cent supporting abolition.31 Non-governmental organizations continued to work on the death penalty in Belarus. On 26 January 2012, Penal Reform International hosted a conference on “The Development of the Criminal Justice System in Belarus”. The event brought together officials from the Belarusian parliament, the General Prosecutor’s Office and Belarusian NGOs, including the Belarusian Helsinki Committee, as well as other governmental representatives and legal practitioners. The conference discussed the prospects for abolition of the death penalty in Belarus and life imprisonment as an alternative 27  Full name: “Parliamentary working group on discussion of the death penalty issue” 28  Response to the ODIHR questionnaire on the death penalty from the Permanent Delegation of the Republic of Belarus to the OSCE, received on 14 August 2012, (Belarus Response). 29  Penal Reform International, “Statement on the situation of the death penalty in Belarus for the International Commission against the Death Penalty”, 22 March 2012, (Penal Reform Belarus), <http://www.penalreform.org/files/PRI%20 statement%20on%20Belarus%20for%20ICDP%20March2012.pdf>. 30  “Lukashenko: Personally I never to abolish death penalty”, www.telegraf.by , 8 May 2012, <http://telegraf.by/ en/2012/05/lukashenko-sam-ya-nikogda-ne-otmenyu-smertnuyu-kazn>. 31  Penal Reform Belarus, op. cit., note 29. 8