20 June 2005 :

Jean de Dieu Muzaliwa Maroy, former death row inmate in the Democratic Republic of Congo, intervened at the UN Comission on Human Rights representing Hands Off Cain and the Transnational Radical Party.
“I am here to ask you to back a resolution for a moratorium on capital executions to be presented by Luxemburg as holders of the EU Presidency. I was one of 300 men sentenced to death by the military courts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for political and war violations and spent four years in Makala prison in Kinshasa. My mother is from Burundi and my father Congolese, and I served as director of fuel for the Congolese armed forces at the time of the war against Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda. I had been forced to confess, under torture, to having sold fuel to those enemies, simply because my mother had been of the same origin.
I still have the scars on my body as a result of the torture. The war is now over and the DRC has a new transitional government, the prosecutor of the military court has now himself been sentenced to death for murder. The story shows that the gallows and corporal punishment, previously unknown in Africa, arrived with European colonisation. Lashings are not in use anymore, except by those who back Sharia law. But Afrcia has still not rid itself of the gallows, the last legacy of colonialism. With the apporval of the initiative for a resolution at the General Assembly and not just at the UNCHR, the Europe which exported the death penalty can redress the situation by helping Africa to eliminate it.”
The National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers also spoke in favour of the presentation of a pro moratorium resolution at the United Nations General Assembly.