In 1996, the then President Boris Yeltsin imposed a...

In 1996, the then President Boris Yeltsin imposed a moratorium on the use of capital punishment when Russia joined the Council of Europe on February 28 of that year. The new Criminal Code specifies capital punishment for three crimes - deliberate manslaughter, terrorist acts, and genocide. The last execution in Russia took place on September 2, 1996. On February 2, 1999 the Constitutional Court ruled that due to loopholes in the acting legislation, no court could sentence a person to capital punishment. In other words, the presidential moratorium on capital punishment is essentially a moratorium of the Constitutional Court. On June 2, 1999, President Yeltsin issued a decree commuting the death sentences of the 716 prisoners to life or 25 years in prison, piling pressure on the country's Parliament to put a definitive end to capital punishment to comply with the terms of its membership of the Council of Europe human rights forum. On August 6, 1999, President Yeltsin formally asked Parliament to abolish the death penalty in Russia, after sending to the State Duma the protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights which would remove capital punishment from the statute books. In September 1999, Russian forces began a military campaign to regain political control of Chechnya. A series of bombings in Russia, which the government blamed on Chechen forces, and the summer 1999 Chechen invasion of Dagestan sparked the armed conflict, the second in the past five years. Both parties to the conflict committed serious abuses in a brutal war that is costing thousands of civilian lives, displacing tens of thousands of people, and causing serious damage to civilian homes and infrastructure. In 1990 the population of Chechnya was 1.21 million; whereas in August 1999 it was only 350,000. Over 600,000 Chechens and over 220,000 Russians were forced to leave the republic.