The Death Penalty in the OSCE Area–Background Paper 2017
(b) To exclude pregnant women and mothers with dependent infants from
capital punishment;
(c) Not to impose the death penalty on a person suffering from any form of
mental disorder or to execute any such person;
(d) Not to impose the death penalty for any but the most serious crimes and
only pursuant to a final judgement rendered by an independent and impartial competent court, and to ensure the right to a fair trial and the right to seek pardon or
commutation of sentence;
(e) To ensure that all legal proceedings, including those before special tribunals or jurisdictions, and particularly those related to capital offences, conform to
the minimum procedural guarantees contained in article 14 of the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;
(f) To ensure that the notion of “most serious crimes” does not go beyond
intentional crimes with lethal or extremely grave consequences and that the death
penalty is not imposed for non violent acts such as financial crimes, religious practice or expression of conscience and sexual relations between consenting adults;
(g) Not to enter any new reservations under article 6 of the Covenant which
may be contrary to the object and the purpose of the Covenant and to withdraw
any such existing reservations, given that article 6 enshrines the minimum rules
for the protection of the right to life and the generally accepted standards in this
area;
(h) To observe the safeguards guaranteeing protection of the rights of those
facing the death penalty and to comply fully with their international obligations, in
particular with those under article 36 of the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular
Relations, particularly the right to receive information on consular assistance
within the context of a legal procedure, as affirmed by the jurisprudence of the
International Court of Justice and confirmed in recent relevant judgments;
(i) To ensure that, where capital punishment occurs, it shall be carried out so
as to inflict the minimum possible suffering and shall not be carried out in public or
in any other degrading manner, and to ensure that any application of particularly
cruel or inhuman means of execution, such as stoning, is stopped immediately;
(j) Not to execute any person as long as any related legal procedure, at the
international or at the national level, is pending;
5. Calls upon all States that still maintain the death penalty:
(a) To abolish the death penalty completely and, in the meantime, to establish a moratorium on executions;
(b) Progressively to restrict the number of offences for which the death penalty may be imposed and, at the least, not to extend its application to crimes to
which it does not at present apply;
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