He leads the security committee at parliament's lower house.
It is impossible even to discuss abolition prospects now-"or the people we want will no longer be extradited to Russia," he warned, and substantiated his point by a reference to international legal norms. As they have it, the country applying for a particular person's extradition must offer exhaustive guarantees of death penalty not threatening that person.
However, there is a decree of the federal Constitutional Court, on which the moratorium can be eventually suspended-but not before trials by jury get on a smooth footing all over Russia, said Vasilyev.
Decreed by Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first president, the capital punishment moratorium entered into force, September 1996.
