THE PHILIPPINES. BISHOPS LAUD CONGRESS FOR REPEAL OF DEATH PENALTY

the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines (CBPC) lauded the move of Congress to abolish the death penalty, revealed CBCP President and Jaro Archbishop Angel Lagdameo.
"This decision is consistent with our long standing and on-going advocacy for the sacredness of human life whose Creator is God Himself. Human life, whose ever it is, is sacred," Lagdameo stated. Lagdameo recalled that in 1971, the United Nations declared that to fully guarantee the right to life as provided by the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the death penalty should be progressively restricted "with a view to the desirability of abolishing this punishment in all countries."
"We hope that the abolition of death penalty in the Philippines will now be a permanent one," Lagdameo stated.
The CBCP believed that ways to curb crime without resorting to the death penalty were: solving economic poverty; reforming the penal system; combating the causes of drug dependency and gambling; installing values in the police and military; eliminating violence propagated by the media; enforcing the law on the prohibition of guns.
"The other side of the abolition of death penalty and the curving of criminality is the improvement of the quality of life," Lagdameo concluded.