Who we are

The Initiative gegen die Todesstrafe e.V. (IgT), in English: German Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (GCADP), was founded in 1997 in Bonn/Germany as an informal community of interest of people who wanted to do something against the death penalty.

In 1999, it was decided to formally establish an association, a constitution was formulated, and a board of directors was elected. The association was registered with the Hamburg District Court and recognized as a non-profit organization by the Hamburg-Mitte-Altstadt tax office on July 13, 2000. Since 2010, the German Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty has been a member of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty (WCADP).

The members of the association come from a wide variety of professions and age groups and live in different parts of Germany as well as in Switzerland and Austria, and occasionally in France, Tobago, Mexico and the USA.

What unites us is our indignation about the cruelty and inhumanity of the death penalty and our decision to become active ourselves in the international fight against the death penalty.

The three pillars of our exclusively voluntary work are information and educational work, non-partisan political commitment and the support of prisoners on death row, primarily in the USA.

The members of the German Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty are aware that a large part of the prisoners on death row have committed immeasurably terrible crimes, and we do not want to trivialize these facts in any way.

Our sincere sympathy goes out to the victims and their families, and within our means we support victim support organizations. However, we still see in an offender the human being whose crime alone does not constitute his entire person.