Method
Before execution, all prisoners on death row are transferred to Minsk Detention Center No. 1 (СИЗО, or SIZO No. 1), located in the capital city of Minsk. The method used to carry out the sentence is execution by shooting. The executioner is a member of the "Committee for the execution of sentences," which also chooses the area where the execution will take place. After the sentence is carried out, a prison doctor and other prison officials certify that the execution has been carried out, and a death certificate is prepared. The remains of the condemned are buried secretly, and the family is notified that the execution took place. Col. Oleg Alkayev, who was a director of SIZO No. 1, claimed that about 130 executions took place at the prison between December 1996 and May 2001, when he left Belarus to live in exile in Berlin, Germany.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee issued the following opinion of the execution process in Belarus after the mother of subsequently executed prisoner Anton Bondarenko petitioned the Committee to spare her son's life:
| “ | the effect of intimidating or punishing families by intentionally leaving them in a state of uncertainty and mental distress… authorities’ initial failure to notify the author of the scheduled date for the execution of her son, and their subsequent persistent failure to notify her of the location of her son’s grave amounts to inhuman treatment of the author, in violation of article 7 of the Covenant . | ” |
Read more about this topic: Capital Punishment In Belarus
Famous quotes containing the word method:
“No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best 20-20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.”
—Robert M. Pirsig (b. 1928)
“Methinks the human method of expression by sound of tongue is very elementary, & ought to be substituted for some ingenious invention which should be able to give vent to at least six coherent sentences at once.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)