At a joint press con­fer­ence held by the European Commission (EC) and the Council of Europe, Vice-President Franco Frattini of the EC stat­ed that ​“the admin­is­tra­tion of State killing via the judi­cial sys­tem serves no use­ful pur­pose in pre­vent­ing crime but can have a bru­tal­is­ing effect on soci­eties that inflict it”.

Their press release mark­ing this occa­sion not­ed that con­sid­er­able progress has been made towards abol­ish­ing the death penalty:

There [has] been con­stant progress towards world­wide abo­li­tion. There are at present 128 coun­tries that are abo­li­tion­ist in law and prac­tice. Over 40 coun­tries have abol­ished the death penal­ty for all crimes since 1990. They include coun­tries in Africa (recent exam­ples include Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire), the Americas (Canada, Paraguay, Mexico), Asia and the Pacific (Philippines, Bhutan, Samoa) and Europe and Central Asia (Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Cyprus, Serbia and Montenegro, Turkey, Turkmenistan). In 2005, coun­tries hav­ing abol­ished death penal­ty were 86, while in 1977, only 16 coun­tries were abolitionist.

The orga­ni­za­tions will spon­sor an inter­na­tion­al con­fer­ence on October 10, 2007, to sup­port uni­ver­sal abo­li­tion and to pro­vide a European per­spec­tive on the annu­al World Day against the Death Penalty, which has tak­en place on October 10 since 2003.
(Press Release from the European Commission, Oct. 10, 2007).

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