in Tunisia, a National Coalition Against the Death Penalty

in Tunisia, a National Coalition Against the Death Penalty is on the road to formation, sources of the Party of Popular Unity announced. The organisations that have joined include the Tunisian Division of Amnesty International, the Tunisian League for the Defence of Human Rights, the League of Journalists, the Arab Institute for Human Rights, and the Tunisian League for Research on Development. Following the publication on February 18, 2007, of a political manifesto by various exponents of a civil Tunisian society, the organisations are preparing the texts for a constitutional pact, an internal statute and an official manifesto.
The initiative is part of the world coalition founded in Rome on May 13, 2002, and the recommendations expressed during the Third World Conference Against the Death Penalty, that took place in February 2007. At the end of last month, the Tunisian Justice Minister stated that in Tunisia the time to abolish the death penalty still hasn’t arrived, despite the fact that there have been no executions in the last 15 years.
Amongst the principal supporters for the abolition are the Tunisian Social Liberal Party, who on February 13, 2007, issued a statement that asked for the cancellation of capital punishment and its substitution with the life imprisonment in the cases of serious and premeditated crimes. Tunisian journalists have also joined the movement, in the name "of the high values that derive from the civil patronage of the country which give them the role of spearhead in many fields."