viii The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area I would like to express my gratitude to those who contributed essays to this background paper. In addition to Mr. Badinter, these individuals are: Grigory A. Vasilevich, chairman of Belarus’s Constitutional Court, and Elissa A. Sarkisova, a judge from Belarus’s Constitutional Court; Aleksandra Gliszczyńska and Katarzyna Sękowska of the Poznan Human Rights Centre, and Professor Roman Wieruszewski, director of the Poznan Human Rights Centre and a member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee; Khalifabobo Khamidov, Tajikistan’s justice minister; Margaret Griffey, chief of the Capital Case Unit of the US Department of Justice, and Laurence E. Rothenberg, senior counsel, Office of Legal Policy of the US Department of Justice. While OSCE participating States are not required to abolish the death penalty, they have made a number of commitments regarding its use. In particular, participating States have committed themselves to impose the death penalty only in a manner that is not contrary to their international commitments. Chapter 3 thus provides an overview of the international standards on the death penalty that have been developed in the framework of the OSCE, the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the European Union. Chapter 4 includes information on the legal framework, statistics on sentences and executions, and information on compliance with the international standards outlined in Chapter 3. This chapter is based primarily on information received from the participating States. Finally, a copy of the questionnaire that was sent to the participating States requesting information on the use of the death penalty is attached as an annex together with full-text reproductions of the relevant OSCE commitments and other international standards and a ratifications table. Recommendations made at OSCE Human Dimension Implementation Meetings are also annexed. I hope that this background paper will be useful to governments and civil society alike in their further debate on issues related to capital punishment and its possible abolition. Ambassador Christian Strohal Director of the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights