State Duma clears out dead bill to exclude death penalty from Russian Criminal Code

The State Duma Council has decided to return a draft law on excluding the death penalty from Russia’s Criminal Code to its co-authors. Vedomosti reported on the change in the legislature’s public records on Wednesday.

The Third Convocation State Duma deputies who presented the bill all the way back in 2001 included the former prime minister Yegor Gaidar (who died in 2009) and the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov (assassinated in 2015). Only one of the bill’s 30 co-authors, Pavel Krasheninnikov, still remains a Duma deputy.

Russia placed a moratorium on capital punishment in 1997. At that time, it joined the Council of Europe and signed Protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits capital punishment in peacetime. Russia never ratified this protocol, and death penalty remains part of its retributive justice system, though only on paper at the moment.

One of the bill’s co-authors, Boris Nadezhdin, explained the likely reason why the bill is being removed from the hopper, when speaking to Vedomosti. Project legislation on identical and closely related matters must be considered by the Duma all at once, according to protocol, he said.

“This is why, when the bosses want to pass some new law, they evacuate all related legislation from the hopper,” Nadezhdin concluded.