DEATH PENALTY: COMPLETION OF THE RADICAL MISSION IN CHAD

The meeting with Prime Minister Emmanuel Nadingar

23 November 2012 :

It ended with a meeting with Prime Minister Emmanuel Nadingar, the Chad mission of the radical delegation.
The delegation is composed by Marco Panella, Demba Traore, Secretary of the Nonviolent Radical Party Transnational and Transparty, Elisabetta Zamparutti, member and treasurer of the association Hands Off Cain and Matthew Angels, general counsel of the NRPTT.
To accompany them, the honorary consul of Italy Ermanna Favaretto Delacroix.
The mission was carried out as part of a project supported by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs aimed to increase the number of votes in support of the resolution for a universal moratorium on executions at the General Assembly of the United Nations in December.
The text has been adopted by the Third Committee last Monday.
Chad, which in 2007 voted against the resolution for a universal moratorium on executions, has since then always been absent at the time of the vote.
The Prime Minister Emmanuel Nadingar, to highlight the commitment of Chad in advancing respect for human rights, pointed out how the new constitution recognizes the inviolability and sacredness of human life.
He has recognized the power and importance of dialogue to address situations where prevailing logic of violence.
In this sense, the Prime Minister has appreciated the spirit in which the delegation, and Marco Pannella in particular, has raised the issue of the death penalty and female genital mutilation.
For the Prime Minister the death penalty is a global problem of a world that does not evolve at the same time and in the same way, and requires, like other global problems, to be governed.
With regard to the internal situation, Nadingar recalled the long presence of armed groups in Chad, animated only by a desire for destruction.
But the President of the Republic has managed to create spaces for dialogue, putting an end to violence in this way.
Marco Pannella has shown that this country has an identity that needs be given an appropriate image.
Pannella, in fact, noted that there have been no executions since 2003, that the new Constitution protects the human person in a form such that the death penalty is virtually unconstitutional, that Chad has accepted in 2009 the recommendation of the Human Rights Council UN to ratify the Second Optional Protocol to the Covenant on civil and Political Rights on the death penalty, and, finally, that Chad has a law prohibiting female genital mutilation. Pannella explained that the vote in favor of the two resolutions on the death penalty and female genital mutilation can help give a better picture of Chad at the international level.
Prime Minister Emmanuel Nadingar, while not explicitly saying if Chad will vote in favor or abstain, said that his country is by now “beyond” the death penalty.
Willingness to participate in the vote of two resolutions was also evident during formal meetings held previously: with the President of the National Assembly, with the Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, the Minister of Justice, Minister for Human Rights, and during the hearing before the Commission on “Communication and fundamental freedoms”.
If on female genital mutilation they expressed more clearly a favourable orientation, regarding the resolution for a moratorium on executions, the authorities of Chad so far have only guaranteed that they will not vote "against" as in 2007.
 

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