On the World Day against Death Penalty, celebrated in October 10th 2018, we will visit prisoners in death rows in different countries around the world.
The mobilisation of civil society is growing - in 2018, more than 1,000 people asked the Community of Sant’Egidio to become pen-pals of a person sentenced to death.
The Community of Sant’Egidio has been supporting people sentenced to death in different countries for many years. It has organized awareness-raising campaigns such as The World Day of Cities for Life / Cities against the Death Penalty. On the World Day against Death Penalty, it encourages visits to death row prisoners in the US, Indonesia and many African countries.
It is crucial that we engage in this battle for civilization and humanity on various levels inside societies, institutions and governments. We need to build confidence that capital punishment will be completely erased from legislations worldwide.
The number of abolitionist countries has indeed increased lately, especially in Africa. Europe, the only continent that has totally abolished capital punishment, may become a lead to follow.
We are even more hopeful and determined after the recent abolition of death penalty in Burkina Faso and Pope Francis’s revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which now teaches: “In the light of the Gospel, the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person”.
The movement against death penalty has been growing in civil society over the last few months: only in 2018, more than 1,000 people asked the Community of Sant’Egidio to correspond with a person sentenced to death. In addition, thousands of Europeans have taken action and signed petitions to defend a prisoner’s life. In some cases, they succeeded in stopping executions.
