Abolish death penalty - Sant’Egidio initiative

(May 18, 2010) To abolish the death penalty, Rome-based Sant’Egidio Community in Italy has been working for years. At the 5th World Congress of Ministers of Justice in Rome that concluded on Tuesday, Mario Marazziti spokesman for Sant’Egidio said “There are many reasons for being against the death penalty but allow me to say just one: because we can never be like those who kill”.
The theme of the two-day congress promoted by Sant’Egidio was “From the moratorium to abolition of the death penalty: there is no justice without life”. Marazziti reminded participants that the goal of the Congress is to “draw up the necessary initiatives to file practices such as torture and slavery as things of the past, deemed necessary and ‘normal’ to the world for millenniums, but that are instead, grave humiliations of what is just and humane”. In emphasising the progressive reduction in the use of capital punishment on a global level, he said until 1973 there were only some twenty nations, in respect to today’s 141. Marazziti concluded his intervention addressing the key role that religions can play in the defence of life “in name and respect of sacredness of every human being”.
For the same reason the Secretary of Vatican’s Justice and Peace Pontifical Council, Monsignor Mario Toso, stressed that “killing the one who has killed is a contradiction, especially on an ethical level”. With the death penalty, added Monsignor Toso, “the society is symbolically faced with an inevitable question: where is our brother? Because also the criminal, like Cain, has human dignity, and no one can lift a hand against him,” he said.