Russia has indefinitely extended a moratorium on the death penalty that was due to expire on January 1, thereby taking one more step on a tortuous journey that began in 1996 and has the definitive abolition of capital punishment as its destination, while opinion polls suggest the majority of Russians want the death penalty to remain in use. The death penalty issue has never been anywhere high on the agendas of the former Soviet Union, nor has it been a widely debated topic in post-Soviet Russia. Nevertheless, Russia committed itself to outlawing capital punishment in 1996 in seeking to join the Council of Europe, whose rules forbid any crime to be punished by death. Though Moscow promised to phase out the death penalty rather than place an immediate and definitive ban on it, Russia was granted Council membership in February 1996. In May of that year, the then Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, issued a decree entitled “On the Stepwise Reduction in the Application of the Death Penalty in Connection with the Accession of Russia to the Council of Europe,” which prescribed that Russia sign Protocol Six to the European Convention on Human Rights, a document prohibiting capital punishment in peacetime. Though Russia carried out its last execution months after the decree came out, Yeltsin's order was widely seen as a de facto moratorium on the death penalty. Russia signed Protocol Six in April 1997, but its parliament has still not approved it. The country is the only member of the 47-nation Council of Europe not to have given parliamentary ratification to the document. A landmark decision came on February 2, 1999, when Russia's Constitutional Court imposed a de jure moratorium on capital punishment. The current version of the Russian constitution, adopted in 1993, gives anyone charged with a capital crime the right to a jury trial, a system re-introduced in Russia that year after being abolished in 1922. Until 2010, the system only existed in parts of Russia, and the Constitutional Court's ruling of February 1999 suspended the use of the death penalty until jury trials were extended to the rest of the country. The court argued it would be unconstitutional to apply capital punishment before then. The death penalty issue resurfaced in autumn 2009 as Chechnya, which, since 2004, had been Russia's only region not to use the jury system, was preparing to introduce it on January 1, 2010. The Supreme Court asked the Constitutional Court whether this meant the green light for bringing capital punishment back into use. The Constitutional Court responded on November 19 with extending the 1999 moratorium indefinitely, though capital punishment remains enshrined in Russia's criminal law. The moratorium, the court said in explaining its suspension of capital punishment, had resulted in “stable guarantees of the right of the individual not to be punished by death and [in] a constitutional regime…involving an irreversible process to abolish the death penalty,” a process that “reflects a trend in international law and is in tune with commitments made by the Russian Federation.” Moreover, the court argued, international law prescribed that Russia comply with Protocol Six as long as it has its signature under it even though its legislature has not yet approved it. Numerous comments were posted on RuNet both before and after the Constitutional Court's ruling, and they essentially reflect the returns of opinion polls on the death penalty issue. Very few posts state unconditional rejection of capital punishment. There are many comments where the death penalty is backed in principle but its use in Russia is opposed to because of the scale of malpractices in the Russian law enforcement system. Some of the posts support the death penalty but suggest that death sentences be deferred so that possible judicial mistakes could be corrected. Typical arguments of advocates of capital punishment are that it works and that it is unfair to spend taxpayers’ money to keep capital offenders who are serving prison terms. Some do not believe that the possibility of innocent people being sentenced to death is a serious reason to scrap capital punishment. One website states the position of the Russian Orthodox Church, the essence of which is that it is the public that should decide and that the death penalty is accepted in the Old Testament and is not rejected in the New Testament. Below are some of the comments. LJ user eduardvalerevi4: Laws to use the death penalty and other strict measures have not been written by totally stupid people, nor are so-called ‘our’ opinions always based on sober-minded thinking and always far-sighted when we see a problem of some kind of illegal act.