Welcomes the abolition of the death penalty in Albania on 25 March 2007 (for all crimes); in Kyrgyzstan on 27 June 2007; in Rwanda on 26 July 2007; in the State of New Jersey (in the United States) on 13 December 2007; and in Uzbekistan on 1 January 2008; expresses its disquiet at the possibility that the death penalty might again start to be enforced in Guatemala; urges the Guatemalan Government, on the contrary, to genuinely commit itself to the universal moratorium on the death penalty; welcomes the decision by China to have all death penalty cases reviewed by the Supreme Court, but remains concerned that China still carries out the greatest number of executions worldwide; condemns the practising of the death penalty in Belarus, ...[+++]which runs counter to European values; condemns the Iranian regime's increasing use of capital punishment; is very concerned that the Iranian regime still sentences to death defendants under the age of 18;

First, as was seen in the section on approximation of alternative sanctions, there are considerable differences regarding their function and their legal nature: in some Member States, certain alternative sanctions are principal or substitute penalties, whereas in others, the same penalties are measures accompanying suspended prison sentences.

The second difficulty concerns the type of judgment, the type of authority giving it (court, but in certain cases a prosecutor whose decision terminates proceedings, or administrative authorities in some cases), the type of penalty or order (imprisonment, suspended or not, alternative penalty, discharge, out-of-court settlement, mediation, etc.), and the quantum of the penalty.

In certain Member States community service may only be imposed for particular offences defined by their nature (Denmark, Italy) or by the severity of the punishment it replaces (e.g. penalty for a summary offence (peine de police) or misdemeanour (peine correctionnelle) in Belgium, prison sentence of up to six months (the Netherlands) or one year (Portugal)).

On the occasion of the World Day against the Death Penalty, organised by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, the EU reaffirms its longstanding position against the use of the death penalty in all circumstances.

Paragraph 4 of Resolution 1999/61 of 28 April 1999, adopted for the first time by an absolute majority of the Member States of the Commission on Human Rights, and co-sponsored by seventy-two States representing all the continents, calls on States which still maintain the death penalty "progressively to restrict the number of offences for which the death penalty may be imposed; to consider suspending executions, with a view to completely abolishing the death penalty; to make available to the public information with regard to the imposition of the death penalty".