TUNISIAN COALITION AGAINST DEATH PENALTY LAUNCHED

in Tunisia, about a hundred personalities, including various artists, and seven NGOs announced the formation of a coalition against the death penalty.
"The coalition will work to abolish capital punishment in Tunisia, where more than 100 people are sentenced to death and languish in prison, waiting for their penalty to be commuted," Mohamed Habib Marsit, President of the local chapter of Amnesty International, told the press.
Other than Amnesty Tunisia, members of the group include the Tunisian League for the Defence of Human Rights, the Women’s Democratic Association, the Arab Institute of Human Rights and the Journalists Association. The personalities include lawyers, film makers, poets, academics, feminists and human rights activists. Marsit also said that the coalition would like to "raise public awareness by launching a campaign against the death penalty, which continues to be applied mainly in Arab countries."
Capital punishment is still applied in Tunisia but there have been no executions since 1994, when a serial killer, guilty of raping and murdering children, was hung. The Minister for Justice and Human Rights, Beschir Tekkari, last March said that during the parliamentary debate "there wasn’t enough time to abolish the death penalty."