made in the Parliament in 1887 and was also rejected. A committee appointed to draft a new constitution for Serbia in 1888 held a debate on the death penalty, but the motion to abolish it was rejected. Another parliamentary debate was held in 1906, with the same result. Among those who spoke against capital punishment was the then minister of justice, Milenko Vesnić. In the parliamentary debates on the draft constitution for the newly created Yugoslavia in 1921, the leftist parties (Communists and Republicans), as well as several smaller parties from Slovenia and Croatia, called for an abolition of the death penalty, but the majority decided to keep it in the constitution. In 1926, women’s organizations in Yugoslavia, headed by the Popular Union of Women (Narodni ženski savez), demanded abolition of capital punishment "for women as well as for men". Marxists scholars, gathered around the Praxis journal, proposed an abolition of the death penalty in 1963. In 1980, a Belgrade lawyer Srđa M. Popović submitted a petition to the Yugoslav authorities to abolish the death penalty. A Society Against the Death Penalty was founded in Belgrade in 1981, but the authorities refused to allow it. In 1983, more than a thousand Yugoslav citizens, mostly from Slovenia, signed a petition to the federal parliament calling for an abolition of capital punishment. Partial abolition, 1992 Constitution of FR Yugoslavia (which consisted of Serbia and Montenegro), adopted on 25 April 1992, abolished capital punishment for federal crimes (including genocide, war crimes, political and military offenses), but the federal units kept the right to prescribe capital punishment for crimes under their jurisdiction (murder and robbery). Final abolition, 2002 On 26 February 2002, the Serbian parliament amended Serbia's Penal Code by deleting from it all references to capital punishment. As was stressed in the parliamentary debate, a paramount motive for this abolition was the intention of the then FR Yugoslavia to join the Council of Europe. At the time of the abolition, there were 12 people in Serbia under the sentence of death. Their sentence was commuted to 40 years in prison. In 2006, new Constitution of Serbia was adopted. Article 24 of the Constitution explicitly forbids enactment of capital punishment. Public opinion In the Fall of 2001, shortly before the Serbian abolition, a study of attitudes to the death penalty, based on a poll of 926 citizens, found the respondents to be equally divided: