Cities For Life Day

On the Cities for Life Day, November 30, cities around the world celebrate the first abolition of the death penalty by a European state, decreed by Peter Leopold Joseph of Habsburg-Lorraine in 1786 for his Grand Duchy of Tuscany. On this occasion the participating cities show their commitment for life and against the death penalty.

On this day, participating cities illuminate a symbolic monument, such as the Atomium in Brussels, the Colosseum in Rome and the Plaza de Santa Ana in Madrid. Participating cities in 2009 include more than 60 capitals worldwide, and over 1,200 cities and towns around the world, such as Rome, Brussels, Madrid, Ottawa, Mexico City, Berlin, Barcelona, Florence, Venice, Buenos Aires, Austin, Dallas, Antwerp, Vienna, Naples, Paris, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Reggio Emilia, Bogotá, Santiago de Chile.

By this symbolic action, these cities demand a stay of all executions worldwide. This initiative is promoted by the Community of Sant'Egidio and supported by the main international human rights organizations, gathered in the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty (Amnesty International, Ensemble contre la Peine de Mort, International Penal Reform, FIACAT).

In 2005, the Cities for Life Day also featured the "Africa for Life" conference about the death penalty in Africa, in which 14 ministers of justice from as many African countries participated. The conference took place in Florence, Tuscany.

Cities continue to join this cause, many in countries that maintain the death penalty.

Famous quotes containing the words cities for, cities, life and/or day:

    1st Murderer. Where’s thy conscience now?...
    2nd Murderer. I’ll not meddle with it. It makes a man a coward.... It fills a man full of obstacles. It made me once restore a purse of gold that by chance I found. It beggars any man that keeps it. It is turned out of towns and cities for a dangerous thing, and every man that means to live well endeavors to trust to himself and live without it.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    I keep having the same experience and keep resisting it every time. I do not want to believe it although it is palpable: the great majority of people lacks an intellectual conscience. Indeed, it has often seemed to me as if anyone calling for an intellectual conscience were as lonely in the most densely populated cities as if he were in a desert.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.
    Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)

    All day long and all night through,
    One thing only must I do:
    Quench my pride and cool my blood,
    Lest I perish in the flood.
    Countee Cullen (1903–1946)