07 November 2006 :

following the death sentence handed down to Saddam Hussein, Sergio D’Elia, Secretary Gen. of Hands Off Cain, and Elisabetta Zamparutti, Treasurer, declared: “A court formed by Shiites and Kurds condemned to death the Sunni Saddam. This isn’t even the justice of the victors over those defeated, but revenge against their executioner. With this Saddam becomes the symbol of the death penalty and our Hands Off Cain applies to him too.
Thus Hands Off Saddam, which does not equate to immunity from justice but to the respect of human rights. For the crimes committed against his people, Saddam would merit not one death sentence but a thousand. But the question is: Do we as a civil society have the right to hand down the death penalty?
This is not the way to present to the world the new Iraq. The international community, which is a mainly abolitionist community, and the EU, engaged in the civil and democratic reconstruction of Iraq, should now prevent the execution of Saddam Hussein. Nothing, however, is to be really expected from this Europe which renounced presenting a resolution for a universal moratorium on capital executions at the UN, demonstrating with its ‘no’ to the moratorium, its willingness to defend the death penalty around the world. The disgrace of this death penalty falls on Europe which defends human rights with chit chat but is in fact a party to their systematic violation in many parts of the world.”