24 June 2009 :

Deputy Chairman of the House of Representatives of the National Assembly of Belarus, Valery Ivanov, doesn’t expect the ban on capital punishment to be a requirement for restoring the Council of Europe’s special guest status for the Belarusian parliament. The parliamentarian made the statement before the press in Strasbourg.
Commenting on the requirement to impose a moratorium on the death penalty, Ivanov informed that Belarus has been consistently moving towards restricting the death penalty use.
It has not been used for a year, and the number of articles of the Criminal Code envisaging the death penalty has been halved.
“The National Assembly has created a working group to study the prospects of abolishing the death penalty in Belarus. Moreover, the abolishment of the death penalty is the condition for joining the Council of Europe but is not an obligatory condition for getting the special guest status,” Ivanov said.