The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area 11 Beginning in the 1990s, lawmakers, following international trends, began to gradually reduce the scope of application of the death penalty, removing it in particular from the articles of the Criminal Code envisioning punishment for crimes not involving intentional infringement on a person’s life. (In effect, the law was brought into line with contemporary practice.) The reduction of the scope of application of the death penalty happened in parallel with an increase in the categories of people exempt from the application of the death penalty. In particular, under the Criminal Code of 1960 and until the adoption of the Law of 1 March 1994, this category included individuals under the age of 18 at the time the crime was committed and women who were pregnant either when the crime was committed or when the sentence was handed down or due to be carried out. Article 22 of the Code, as amended by the aforementioned Law, banned the use of the death penalty for women entirely. Belarus’s Criminal Code adopted on 9 July 1999, which entered into force on 1 January 2001, reduced the scope of possible application of the death penalty by more than half as much again. The death penalty can now be applied only in particularly serious cases of premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances. In addition, the categories of those exempt from this form of punishment were expanded to include males over the age of 65 at the time of sentencing. In other words, the history of Belarusian criminal legislation regulating the application of the death penalty shows that there has been a trend towards limiting the use of this punishment, with the subsequent possibility of abolishing it. Judicial practice also shows the same trend. First, the death penalty has for several decades now been applied only in cases of premeditated murder with aggravating circumstances. Second, whereas up to and including 1999 dozens of people were condemned to death annually – for 1995-1999 the figures were 37, 29, 46, 47, and 13, respectively – after 2000, the numbers drop to single digits – for 2000-2005, the figures are 4, 7, 4, 4, 2, and 2, respectively (as a percentage of the total number of convictions, this is a fraction of 1 per cent). We should also note that the annual number of those convicted of murder with aggravating circumstances is 400-450; in 2005, for example, 439 people were convicted of this crime. Moreover, the majority of those were sentenced not to life imprisonment as an alternative to the death penalty but to prison terms of various lengths, including some of under 25 years. (Life imprisonment was introduced into the Criminal Code only at the end of 1997. In 1998-2005, the numbers of those sentenced to it were 3, 29, 18, 11, 15, 12, 12, and 8, respectively.) Thus, judicial practice illustrates that there is a de facto moratorium on the death