long term PD may end in result --- Let me share with you one of my experience which perhaps reflects that PD activities in certain areas are indeed for medium-to -long term and might only reach partial success but are still very important and necessary in the long run. Back in 2010, when I used to work for the EU Delegation to Malaysia, we had launched a kind of campaign on the abolition of the death penalty. To be honest at that time we did not use the term public diplomacy campaign although definitely at least partly it was PD activity. It was part of the broader human rights country strategy and also part of the general EU strategy of fighting against the capital punishment. It resulted as far as I know in partial success as in July 2018, the Malaysian government established an immediate moratorium on executions and it is also expected to table legislation in the Parliament that would remove the mandatory death penalty for 11 offences. (Our Malaysian colleague can correct me if I am wrong or missed some information). At that time we did not use social media tools,(we might have been mosre effective but those were different times) but we drew up a multifaceted series of events. On ambassadorial level we met with the law minister, with the attorney general,with parliamentarians, with the human rights commission of Malaysia to explain our position on the matter and to share the objective of our campaign as well as to get a clear picture of the offiacial position of the country in this regard. As a kick off event we managed to get into the country an attorney (if I remember well) from the International Court of Justice – who was in the region at that time and was ready to cooperate with us - who made a presentation on the legal reasoning of the abolition and the experiences of the last few decades along pros and cons. Through this we gained our legal argumentation for the campaign id est it is not the severity of the punishment which restrains from committing a capital offence but the certainty of the implementation of any kind of punishment namely that you can’t get off light – this is what is dissuasive. We had as main partner the Malasian Bar and also different national and international civil society organisations, and as the government told us that it was the Malaysian public which was rather against abolition we needed to change their mindset through annual public conferences on the topic, public forums with the participation of those whose relatives were on the death row, published news paper articles, we followed and visited court cases of the kind in Malaysia and in the region. It was a great experience.

Source author: Adrienn Sallai sadrienn78@yahoo.co.uk