rights activists welcomed the abolition of capital punishment in Tajikistan

rights activists welcomed the abolition of capital punishment in Tajikistan, the second country in the Central Asian region to abolish the death penalty for all crimes.
"It is a very important event for us because up to recently Tajikistan was considered one of the countries where capital punishment was used quite often," Nigina Bakhrieva, a programme coordinator with the National Bureau of Human Rights and Rule of Law, a local rights group, said.
"It is a very positive development and one can have only a positive reaction to it," Bakhrieva added. "It was quite a surprise for us when the moratorium on the death penalty was adopted last year and when parliament quite speedily abolished the death penalty itself."
Dushanbe declared a moratorium on executions in April 2004.
"Abolition of the death penalty is major progress in the country," Kanat Khamidova, head of the League of Female Lawyers of Tajikistan, said.
 "We welcome the abolition of the death penalty in Tajikistan and we favour its complete abolition [elsewhere in the world]," Sahiba Shaykenova, an information analyst with Penal Reform International (PRI), an international group seeking to achieve penal reform by promoting the abolition of the death penalty, said from the Kazakh commercial capital, Almaty.
Their comments followed the decision on February 11 by the Tajik parliament to amend the criminal code of the former Soviet republic and replace the death penalty with life imprisonment.
Dushanbe had drawn international criticism over its death row policy over the past few years. "From 2000 there was much discussion about Tajikistan and how big the problem of the death penalty in the country was," Bakhrieva said.