a court in southern Vietnam sentenced a Chinese woman to death for circulating large amounts of counterfeit Vietnamese currency, the presiding judge said.

nine members of an outlawed religious sect in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) were

Foreign Affairs Minister Franco Frattini said that Italy will promote a new UN resolution to confirm the moratorium on the death penalty that was approved last December by the United Nations General Assembly and to push countries that still employ the death penalty to stop its use."

the reformist Iranian newspaper Kargozaran published a public appeal asking the chief magistrate to suspend the execution of six Kurdish activists.

support for the death penalty is a denial of the basic Christian belief that God can turn any person from a life of sin, a Vatican official told a group of justice ministers, judges and lawmakers examining positions on capital punishment. Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for Migrants and Travelers, spoke at the conference "No Justice Without Life," which gathered representatives from 16 countries in Rome for a daylong meeting.

a decision by the Conservative government to stop seeking clemency for a Canadian man on death row in the United States was arbitrary and unfair, his defense lawyer said.

eight people were convicted and sentenced to death over murder by the High Court criminal session held at Mubende during the months of August and September, according to the official report of court proceedings.

Nigeria's National Human Rights Commission called on the government to examine why so many Nigerians are facing the death penalty worldwide.

a court in Shah Alam, Selangor, Malaysia, passed the death sentence on an Acehnese migrant worker from Indonesia named Junaidi Nurdin, 32, for distributing 979 grams of hemp in the country.

regarding the Chamber of Deputies' ratification of Protocol No 13 of the European Convention for the protection of human rights and fundamental liberties, Democratic Party Radical Parliamentarian Elisabetta Zamparutti said: "The vote today is the final point in a long evolution of European culture. The ratification of Protocol No 13 was perfectly consistent with the Italian judicial rule to remove the death penalty for military crimes.

a death row inmate in Botswana, Kedisaletse Tsobane, 49, who was convicted of killing his 10 year old daughter in 2004, was executed. On July 21, the Court of Appeal dismissed his case. Tsobane was sentenced to death by the Francistown High Court after he was convicted of killing his 10 year old daughter in 2004 to avoid paying for her maintenance. He pleaded guilty to a charge of murder.

Speaking to the United Nations in New York, the Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has called for a universal moratorium on the death penalty in 2015 as a first step towards its complete abolition.