Russia’s dark path towards the death penalty

In Russia these days, the reintroduction of the death penalty has a grim inevitability about it. There has been a moratorium on capital punishment since 1996, but there are increasing calls for its revival.

In December last year, the Head of the Constitutional Court Valery Zorkin wrote that the original moratorium had been a surrender to values ‘alien to the Russian national sense of justice’. The feeble Dmitri Medvedev, Putin’s erstwhile presidential seat-warmer, has reinvented himself as a hardline proponent of the ‘Supreme Penalty’. In a recent interview he claimed that, given Russia had left the Council of Europe, there were no obstacles stopping its reintroduction. The deputy head of the Duma’s legal committee Yury Sinelschikov went further, arguing that Russia could sentence people to death right now if it wished: all that was needed was the ‘political will’ to do it.

Why, one might ask, this sudden enthusiasm for the death penalty in Russia? To an observer things might appear to be settling down in the country.