This is a translation of the article that Inga posted on our Russian version. In her post she elaborates on the issue of death penalty in Kyrgyzstan. Some background information in Russian can also be found here. For additional comments on the controversial death sentence of Rustam Abdullin check dieselforum.

This week Kyrgyz court came up with one more death sentence. Rustam Abdullin was sentenced to death penalty for based on the number of charges. He is accused to be the one responsible for the murder of the Kyrgyz MP Tynichbek Akmatbaev, for creating a criminal gang and possessing guns. But today no one can actually predict how long it’ll take before Abdullin is actually penalized since the real death penalty has not been carried out in Kyrgyzstan for almost 8 years for now. Every year, following the recommendations of the world community, Kyrgyzstan keeps prolonging the moratorium on death penalty. Since June 1998 charges of 35 convicted to death were dropped, but twice as much people just died in jails. Now there are about 200 people sentenced to death are in line.

At the end of the day it turns out that the government trying to be human is not human at all. Stretching the terms of death penalties inevitably leads to packing up prison cells with more and more people. Nowadays in almost every “death” cell there are 6 to 8 convicted whereas normally the whole prison for criminals sentenced to death can accommodate only 32 people.
In this situation it’ll probably be wise to change the status of convicted and shift into the category of life term imprisoned. President Bakiev has already suggested this last year but no concrete measures have been undertaken by far. In the country there are no even special premises for such prisoners.

The Head of the Kyrgyz Court Kurmanbek Osmonov thinks that the system is not ready to deal with life term sentenced prisoners at all. This opinion is shared by many of those who are dealing with sentenced criminals every day.

“We can not handle many life term convicted prisoners because we simply don’t have enough money for that,”-comments the director of the Prosecution Unit 1 in Bishkek Asylbek Kydyshev,-“Now those prisoners who are already in our jail keep living in terrible conditions. We can not provide them with enough food, not to mention about medicare.”

As Uzbek agi Chotonov ,one of the religious thinkers, emphasizes: “When we are dealing with such criminals we should pay them back with the same price. The concept of revenge is not foreign for me at all. I’m for public death punishments. Western countries want us to ban death penalty. But if they are humanistic let them adopt all our criminals and handle them outside of Kyrgyzstan ”.

There is certain logic in this approach. No person, no problem. Those supporting death penalty use it as the main argument. But according to the opinion of Maria Lisytzina it’s not the best solution.

The leader of the Youth Human Rights Advocates group argues: “This is indeed a lame excuse. Does it mean that if we don’t have money we should kill everyone? Kyrgyzstan should reconsider its priorities provide prisoners with decent life conditions ”.

Though for now the working group handling the process of drafting the new Kyrgyz Constitution decided to stick to the old variant of the legislation concerning death penalty.