Human rights activists are calling for the soonest...

Human rights activists are calling for the soonest introduction of a moratorium on the death penalty and a further abolition of it in Kazakhstan.
"We lived in brutal times and got used to not thinking that the state's role as a executioner was immoral," the chairwoman of the Helsinki committee for human rights in Almaty, Ninel Fokin, told a news conference in Almaty. Fokin said that the statistical data on the number of people sentenced to the death penalty in Kazakhstan remained secret information despite a number of international conventions endorsed by the country. That is why human rights activists use information from indirect sources.
Fokin recalled that in April, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev called in his address to the nation for a serious study of the issue of introducing a moratorium on capital punishment as well as full abolition of it. Meanwhile, execution of those sentenced to the death penalty is still continuing in Kazakhstan, according to her data. In this connection, Fokin thinks that introduction of a moratorium should not be postponed because the delay is tantamount to death in this case. Fokin recalled that in accordance with world practice neither abolition nor introduction of the death penalty influences the criminal situation in society.
According to the estimations by the Almaty office of the Helsinki committee for human rights, the construction of a prison where convicts could serve a life sentence would cost the country about 1.5bn tenge (the current exchange rate is 153.1 tenge to the dollar [about 9.8m dollars]). She thinks that this is not a large amount of money for the state to justify the delay in solving the issue of changing the death penalty for life imprisonment as far as the financial aspect is concerned.