Tajikistan's lower house of parliament ruled that women...

Tajikistan's lower house of parliament ruled that women found guilty of major crimes would no longer be executed, while their male counterparts were still subject to capital punishment. Parliament also cut the number of crimes for which the death penalty is applied from 15 to five - premeditated murder of two or more people, rape, terrorist acts, genocide, and crimes involving chemical, nuclear or biological weapons. It gave no clear explanation as to why women would be spared the death penalty for the same crimes. The bill was proposed by President Emomali Rakhmonov and was part of a wider-reaching judicial reform that aimed to "democratize" the isolated Central Asian country's penal code. Until 1998, the code included 44 statutes punishing people with execution.