Seoul (AsiaNews) – Next month the ruling URI Party (Our Party) will table in parliament a bill abolishing the death penalty. Life sentences without commutation will replace it.

The legislation is currently being prepared by Representative Yoo In-tae, Senior Secretary for political affairs to President Roh Moo-hyun. Mr. Yoo is trying to persuade a majority of lawmakers to support his bill, including those of his own party who are against abolition.

"I'm promoting the amendment in a bid to clear Korea's shameful history and not repeat the killing of innocent people," Yoo said.

Ethical and humanitarian reasons are behind the initiative, but political considerations are not absent. Abolishing capital punishment is part and parcel of the decade-long process of democratisation. Under previous military dictatorships capital punishment was used as an instrument of political repression. In 1974 under Dictator Park Chung-hee, then university student Yoo was sentenced to death with twelve colleagues. The sentence was carried for eight of them within eight hours of the court's decision.

Korea is one of 86 countries that still use capital punishment, but 20 of these have not carried out executions in the last 10 years. In South Korea executions have been suspended since the election of former president Kim Dae-jung in 1997. According to a spokesperson for the Justice Ministry there are 58 inmates on death row.

"I think capital punishment should be abolished," said Kim Gap-bae, a lawyer and member of the Korean Bar Association. "Life is the supreme value, which cannot be taken away by other means. Moreover, there is no evidence to prove that executions deter brutal crimes," Kim added.

Adopting the bill will not however be easy. This is the third attempt to amend existing legislation. In 2001 it failed because the then Conservative-controlled Justice Committee of the National Assembly was able to block it. The situation is better today since the URI Party now has eight members on that committee against six for the opposition Grand National Party (GNP) and one for the Democratic Labour Party (DLP). The DLP normally backs URI in the area of human rights protection, and the GNP is becoming more open to the possibility.

Through the initiatives and statements of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea the South Korean Church has been campaigning against capital punishment for a long time and welcomes Representative Yoo's bill.