Following an Executive Committee decision in July 2013 Parliamentarians for Global Action (PGA), with the encouragement of the UK All-Party Group on the Abolition of the Death Penalty has started preparations towards the creation of the global parliamentary platform for abolition.
On the 15th October, Officers of the All-Party Group, Baroness Stern, Lord Dubs and Mark Pritchard MP (Executive Committee member of PGA) met with the outgoing Secretary General of PGA, Shazia Rafi, the Secretary General designate, Dr. David Donat-Cattin and former PGA Board Member Naveed Qamar, MP (Pakistan), in the House of Lords in London, to discuss how to proceed.
It was agreed that funding should be secured in order for the PGA to carry out a dedicated programme of work on abolition. In this, the PGA will work closely with all those already active in the field, NGOS and parliamentarians. PGA members are already active on death penalty issues. For example a member in Uganda recently introduced a bill to the Ugandan Parliament to abolish the mandatory use of the death penalty.
The establishment of a death penalty resource at the PGA will reinforce and focus such activity, however, with a range of services such as the introduction of weekly updates with media resources, informational bulletins, country-specific strategies and action plans, the facilitation of peer to peer networking and the encouragement of multi-party dialogue.
