1. The European Union welcomes the recent developments in the United States of America concerning the death penalty.
2. We welcome the approval, on 22 February, of the bill to abolish capital punishment in the Commonwealth of Virginia, home to a number of US Presidents and Founding Fathers, and we now look forward to the bill being signed into law as scheduled for April 2021.
3. This decision is indeed an important step forward and has a very special significance, as Virginia is one of the States with the highest number of executions in US history.
4. With the forthcoming signature of the bill by Governor Ralph Northam, Virginia will become the 23rd US State to abolish the death penalty and the fourth to do so over the last four years, following Washington in 2018, New Hampshire in 2019 and Colorado in 2020.
5. It is also with great appreciation that the EU notes the decrease of executions in the USA in the last 20 years and that there seems to be a slow yet steady shift in perceptions with regard to the death penalty within American society.
6. The EU urges other US States to follow the recent examples of Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire and Washington and to put an end to the death penalty.
7. The EU also encourages President Biden’s administration to re-establish a moratorium on federal executions, as a first step towards the abolition of the death penalty.

The following countries align with this statement: Albania, Andorra, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Georgia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Republic of Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Republic of North Macedonia, Norway, San Marino, Serbia, Ukraine and United Kingdom