Seven Senegalese human rights NGOs and associations...

Seven Senegalese human rights NGOs and associations have embarked on a campaign to end the death penalty in the country.
The campaign will culminate in a nation-wide march on December 10, according to the organisers.
The campaign will be launched in the framework of a large coalition against death penalty.
Initiated by the Senegalese section of Amnesty International (AI), the campaign would like "to remove the death penalty from Senegal's criminal law," the secretary general of AI Senegal, Demba Cire Bathily, told PANA.
The campaign's plan of action provides for training, information and updating seminar for organisers to be held on July 20.
According to AI, "the current global trend is in favour of the abolition of death penalty."
A document issued to the press by the organisation showed that the number of executions throughout the world had risen in 2001 to reach 2,340 in 43 countries.
The document classified countries where the death penalty did not exist, those that had partially abolished it and those where it existed but "has not been applied it for a very long time."
Senegal is in the last category, and its courts in 2002 pronounced four death penalty sentences.
There have been two executions in the post-independence penal history of Senegal.
The first was carried in 1965 against the author of an attempted assassination of the country's first president, Leopold Sedar Senghor. The last death sentence to be carried in Senegal was in 1967 for the murderer of a politician, Demba Diop.
Senegalese authorities, responding to an AI April report, emphasized that "Senegal has not applied the penalty since 1967," adding that "for a possible further evolution of the legislation, a discussion is underway and will involve the country's civil society."