it16. 4. CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE OSCE REGION In 1998 and 1999, the trend towards abolition of the death penalty within the OSCE area remained unbroken. While at the end of 1997 the legal codes of 22 participating States still provided for capital punishment, by the end of the period under review this number had dropped to 15. As of 31 December 1999, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, BosniaHerzegovina (Republika Srpska), Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Malta, the Russian Federation, Tajikistan, Turkey, Ukraine, the United States of America, and Uzbekistan had not completely abolished the death penalty. In addition, capital punishment also remained in force in a number of separatist, internationally unrecognized entities, namely Abkhazia and South-Ossetia (both within Georgia), Chechnya (within the Russian Federation), Nagorno-Karabakh (within Azerbaijan), and Transdniestria (within Moldova). Seven participating States removed the death penalty entirely from their statute books during the period under review: Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Estonia, Lithuania, Turkmenistan and the United Kingdom. Thus, the total number of completely abolitionist participating States had reached 39 by December 1999. Five participating States either abolished capital punishment de facto without having amended their legislation yet or retain the death penalty only for wartime crimes. Ukraine de facto abolished the death penalty for all peacetime and wartime crimes with the decision of the Constitutional Court in December 1999 that capital punishment is unconstitutional. Azerbaijan (in 1998) and Latvia (with the ratification of Protocol No. 6 to the ECHR in April 1999) abolished capital punishment for peacetime offences only. Albania is de facto abolitionist for Create PDF in your applications with the Pdfcrowd HTML to PDF API PDFCROWD