Appeal to the United Nations
Hands Off Cain promoted an appeal to the Secretary-General of the United Nations for a universal moratorium on capital executions. The appeal, signed by fourteen Nobel laureates and by dozens of intellectuals, artists and public figures from all over the world, anticipated by some years the historic 2007 UN Resolution for the moratorium on capital executions, which our association helped to bring to success. This appeal is still relevant and needs your support.
NOBEL LAUREATES
The Nobel laureates who signed.
Oscar Arias Sánchez Mairead Corrigan Maguire Dalai Lama Dario Fo Mikhail Gorbachev Nadine Gordimer Rita Levi Montalcini Rigoberta Menchú Tum Adolfo Pérez Esquivel José Ramos-Horta José Saramago Desmond Tutu Elie Wiesel Betty Williams
With your signature you help us strengthen this result.
After the 2007 vote and then again in 2008, every two years, the United Nations General Assembly votes on a new Resolution that over time has found a growing number of countries in favour of the moratorium on capital executions.
THE TEXT OF THE APPEAL
To the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
We, the undersigned, believe that humanity must move forward and that the abolition of the death penalty is not only a necessity of the individual, the further strengthening of the sphere of their inviolability, but more and more a historical and universal necessity, the point of arrival of our era, the meeting point of different civilisations.
After the abolition of slavery and the prohibition of torture, the right not to be killed as a result of a judicial measure must be another common denominator, a new and irreducible dimension of the human being that makes all of us a single community.
We, the undersigned, ask the United Nations to free the international community from this anachronism and to establish a universal moratorium on executions, with a view to the complete abolition of the death penalty.
PERSONALITIES
Intellectuals, artists and public figures.
Isabel Allende Theo Angelopoulos M. Cherif Bassiouni Marco Bellocchio Monica Bellucci Tahar Ben Jelloun Mario Benedetti Bernardo Bertolucci Emma Bonino Elena Bonner Sacharova Alex Boraine Chico Buarque Noam Chomsky Paulo Coelho Daniel Cohn-Bendit Mario Cuomo Umberto Eco Carla Fracci Peter Gabriel Richard Gere David Grossman Eva Herzigova Serhiy Holovaty Bianca Jagger Asma Jahangir Wei Jingsheng Graça Machel Marie Claire Mendes-France Stella Obasanjo Alan Parker Tim Robbins Vasco Rossi Enrico Ruggeri Edward Said Menda Sakae Maya Sansa Susan Sarandon Fernando Savater Luis Sepulveda Oliviero Toscani Gore Vidal Harry Wu