OREANDA-NEWS. President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev signed amendments to the legislation on the abolition of the death penalty, the press service of the head of state said.

Tokayev on January 2 this year agreed on a law on the ratification of the second optional protocol to the international covenant on civil and political rights, aimed at abolishing the death penalty. Then Kazakhstan ratified the protocol with a reservation, retaining the right to use the death penalty in wartime for committing serious crimes of a military nature. In November, Tokayev said that the republic should abolish the death penalty without any reservations about the possibility of its use for war crimes.

It is noted that amendments to the legislation abolish the capital punishment from all articles of the Republic's Criminal Code. This became necessary after, in January 2021, Kazakhstan ratified the Second Optional Protocol to the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, aimed at abolishing the death penalty. The Senate also stressed that the decision will help guarantee the right to life.

The strictest punishment in the Central Asian republic will now be life imprisonment.

Earlier, Gazeta.Ru reported that a law on the abolition of the death penalty, previously adopted by the country's National Assembly, had come into force in Sierra Leone. According to the human rights organization Amnesty International, by the end of 2020, there were 144 states in the world in which the death penalty was abolished.

The current Criminal Code of Kazakhstan provides for the death penalty under 17 articles. Moreover, in all cases, the court has an alternative in the form of life imprisonment.

Currently, the republic has a moratorium on the death penalty. On December 17, 2003, the first president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, announced the introduction of an indefinite moratorium on the execution of sentences to the death penalty pending a decision on its abolition. The decree entered into force on January 1, 2004.