BELARUS: MORE TIME NEEDED FOR MORATORIUM

Belarus isn’t excluding the introduction of the moratorium on the death penalty, but it needs more time. "Not everything is as easy as it seems to our European colleagues," Boris Batura, president of the National Assembly in Minsk, said in an interview with Russian news agency Interfax.
"I think that we need some time to decide if declaring a moratorium on the death penalty requires a series of preparatory measures, including the shaping and monitoring public opinion."
The president of the Assembly maintained that capital punishment is now used less in the country, and that the cases in which it can be applied in the penal code are 50% less than in the past.
“The real problem,” he added, “is that for a considerable section of the public the death penalty is acceptable, especially for very serious crimes.” Therefore the real challenge is “to break this dangerous mentality and avoid people considering some types of punishment as equivalents to impunity.”