The attack on a concert hall just outside Moscow that killed 139 people last Friday has prompted some Russians to call for the death penalty to be reinstated in Russia and the perpetrators to be executed.
Through a combination of presidential acts and court rulings, Russia has had a moratorium on the death penalty for 28 years. And yet the death penalty remains on the books — suspended but not completely abolished.
Russian officials disagree over whether and how he could be resurrected, and the country’s Constitutional Court said Tuesday it would look into the matter.
Here’s a look at where the issue lies.
Who supports or opposes the death penalty?
Some public figures have called for the concert hall attackers, described by officials as Islamist militants from Tajikistan, in Central Asia, to be executed. Such calls have appeared periodically, particularly after terrorist attacks, but it is unclear how widespread their support is, and they also have prominent opponents.
On Monday, Dmitry A. Medvedev, Russia’s former president and prime minister, wrote on Telegram: “Is it necessary to kill them? Necessary. And it will happen.”
He added that all those involved in the attacks, including those who financed and supported them, should be killed.
However, Lidia Mikheeva, the secretary of the Civic Chamber, a government advisory group, told the state-run Tass news agency that ending the death penalty was one of the most significant achievements in modern Russian history. “If we don’t want to go back to an era of savagery and brutality, then we should all stop and think,” he said.
Where is Putin?
Nothing is likely to change without a statement from Vladimir V. Putin, the authoritarian president who largely controls Parliament. He has publicly opposed the death penalty in recent years.
Mr Putin and his security apparatus have often been accused of killing or trying to kill his enemies, at home or abroad – journalists, political opponents, business leaders, former spies and others. Opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny, who survived an assassination attempt with a nerve agent, died last month in a Russian prison system where his allies said he was mistreated and denied medical treatment.
And yet in 2002, Mr Putin said, “as long as it’s up to me, there will be no death penalty in Russia”, although he said reinstating it would be popular. In 2007, he told a conference that the official death penalty was “unreasonable and counterproductive,” according to Russian media reports. In 2022, he said his position “hasn’t changed.”
Regarding the discussion after the concert hall massacre, “We are not currently participating in this discussion,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry S. Peskov said, according to Tass.
How did the moratorium start and how has it continued?
The Soviet Union was one of the world’s most frequent users of the death penalty, and after the country’s breakup, Russia continued to carry out executions.
But in 1996, to win membership in the Council of Europe, a human rights group, President Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Putin’s predecessor, agreed to put a moratorium on the death penalty and abolish it entirely within three years.
Russia’s parliament did not agree to the plan. It did not ratify the European Convention on Human Rights, which Mr. Yeltsin’s government had signed up to, and adopted a new criminal code that kept the death penalty as an option.
In 1999, the Constitutional Court intervened, ruling that until jury trials were held across Russia, the death penalty could not be applied. In 2009, after jury trials were launched, the court ruled that the moratorium would remain in place, adhering to Council of Europe rules, in part because more than a decade without the death penalty had given people the expectation that it would not be used .
“Firm guarantees of the human right not to be subject to the death penalty have been formulated and a constitutional and legal status has emerged,” the court wrote.
What would be required to repeat the executions?
This is unclear.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Council of Europe expelled Russia, meaning Moscow was no longer considered a party to the human rights convention – the original basis for the moratorium.
At the time, Valeriy D. Zorkin, head of the Constitutional Court, said that reinstating the death penalty would be impossible without the adoption of a new Constitution.
“Despite the current exceptional situation, I think it would be a big mistake to move away from the path of humanizing legislative policy that we have generally followed in recent decades,” he said in a lecture at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum. “And, in particular, rejecting the moratorium on the death penalty in Russia, which some politicians are already calling for, would now send a very bad message to society.”
However, some politicians insisted that without the human rights convention as an obstacle, the death penalty could be restored without any constitutional change.
This position was expressed this week by Vyacheslav V. Volodin, speaker of the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. The Constitutional Court, he said, could lift the moratorium.
“Me and all of you, we left the Council of Europe, right? Right,” he said.
