Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Russia’s Constitutional Court extended a moratorium on capital punishment, ruling that the ban introduced in 1999 had set in motion an “irreversible process” toward the abolition of capital punishment in Russia.

In the decade since the court issued the ban, “stable guarantees of a person’s right not to be subjected to the death penalty have taken shape,” the St. Petersburg-based court said in its ruling today.

The court in 1999 imposed a moratorium on the death penalty until a federal law took effect ensuring the right to a jury trial in all of Russia’s regions. The last region without jury trials, Chechnya, plans to implement them starting Jan. 1.

The introduction of jury trials across Russia “doesn’t open the possibility for imposing the death penalty,” including in sentences imposed in jury trials, Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin said when delivering the ruling.

“Russia doesn’t want to be publicly shown as a pariah country, and this allows them to say, ‘We are part of Europe,’ and at the same time to contrast themselves with the United States,” Ethan S. Burger, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said by telephone from Washington before today’s ruling.

‘Threat of War’

Russia committed to get rid of the death penalty when it became a member of the Council of Europe in 1996 and signed Protocol 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which requires countries to abolish the death penalty except in “time of war or of imminent threat of war.” Russia’s parliament hasn’t ratified the protocol.

The extension of the moratorium means Russia is still obliged to abide by the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights, which in recent years has heard more cases against Russia than any other country, Burger said.

More than 60 percent of Russians say they want to revive capital punishment and to extend it to a wider range of crimes, according to a poll conducted by the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion.

“Our society has to mature before we can completely abolish the death penalty,” President Dmitry Medvedev’s representative to the court, Mikhail Krotov, told reporters today. “This moment hasn’t arrived.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Anastasia Ustinova in St. Petersburg at austinova@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: November 19, 2009 06:59 EST