The World Day against the Death Penalty will be celebrated tomorrow, October 10th. For the occasion, the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty has chosen a special focus, which this year will be about death-row inmates, who have to keep waiting for their execution, sometimes for a long time. “Whether this is about the conditions of solitary confinement in the USA or overcrowded prisons in some African and Asian countries, the living conditions of death-row inmates are a source of dehumanisation and are detrimental to people’s dignity”, the Coalition’s website says.
“To respond to the Coalition’s appeal, Acat Italia (Azione dei cristiani per l’abolizione della tortura), which has always been fighting for the repeal of the death penalty along with international Acat agencies, decided to focus their urgent appeal of the month to the case of Ho Duy Hai, a Vietnamese boy who is barely 30 years old and who has been in death row for 10 years, having been sentenced in 2008 and undergone a quite inconsistent trial”, the president of Acat Italia, Massimo Corti, stated. “Too many cases like Ho Duy Hai’s still happen in the world – he goes on –; too many people have to endure the endless torture of not knowing when the sentence will actually be executed, men and women annihilated even before dying. Our job is to make people aware of this as much as we can, so that the cruelty of death penalty can finish and a universal moratorium can be enacted”.