Amnesty to target ROK in campaign against death penalty

Pressian tells that Amnesty International has designated South Korea as a target country for the year 2006 in the campaign for the abolition of death penalty. It's been now eight years since last executions took place in South Korea, and Amnesty considers countries in which no executions have been carried out for 10 years as countries with "provisional abolition of death penalty" (whatever the Amnesty wording in English might be - that's what you get when translating back from Korean). Amnesty must have considered that since there's been a strong movement among the legislators to have death penalty abolished - a bill signed by a majority was drafted already last year - South Korea might need a bit of encouragement. And this part of Korea is the one in which this kind of campaigning is not considerded warmongering or interfering in the domestic affairs of another country. The bill was presented as I mentioned already at the end of the last year to the Legislation Committee, and it was supposed to have been taken up in the parliament already last September (my post from Agust 30, 2005), but that doesn't seem to have happened, despite of 10 of the 15 members of the committee being for the abolition (Hankyoreh, Aug 20, 2005). Categories at del.icio.us/hunjang: Koreansociety • deathpenalty