China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen and the United States carried out the most executions last year, bucking a global trend towards the abolition of the death penalty, according to a report released this week.
China again was by far the world’s most prolific executioner, putting to death thousands, said Amnesty International in its report on the death penalty worldwide. Amnesty does not provide a precise figure for executions in China as Beijing keeps such figures secret. Instead, it has challenged the Chinese authorities to publish figures of the number of people sentenced to death and executed each year to confirm claims of a reduction in the use of the death penalty.
China, however, last year did move to cut down the number of offences that carry the death penalty, which applies to no fewer than 68 crimes. If the changes go through, the death penalty will be removed for such crimes as tax fraud and for smuggling valuables and cultural relics. Amendments to the criminal code may also remove it as a punishment for those over 75. In all, the changes would affect 13 death penalty offences.
Setting China aside, Amnesty said at least 527 executions were carried out last year. Almost half of those took place in Iran (252). North Korea executed 60, Yemen 53 and the US 46. The minimum number of executions was down from at least 714 in 2009.
Methods of execution included beheading, electrocution, hanging, lethal injection and various kinds of shooting (by firing squad and at close range to the heart or the head). No stonings were recorded in 2010, but stoning sentences were reported in Nigeria, Pakistan and Iran, where at least 10 women and four men remain under stoning sentences.
At least 2 024 new death sentences were imposed during 2010 in 67 countries, including 365 in Pakistan alone, meaning it has about 8 000 on death row. Amnesty expressed particular alarm that a significant proportion of executions or death sentences recorded in 2010 were for drug-related offences. They accounted for more than half of 114 sentences in Malaysia.
Meanwhile, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates ignored international prohibitions and imposed death sentences on child offenders — people aged 17 or less — with Iran executing one such offender. The underlying trend, however, was strongly toward abolition, Amnesty said, with 31 countries having removed the punishment in law or in practice in the past 10 years.
Death roll
- China executed more people than the rest of the world put together: in 2010, 23 countries around the world carried out executions.
- Four countries in the G20 imposed the death penalty: China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the US.
- Four men were executed in Equatorial Guinea last year within an hour of being sentenced to death by a military court.
- At least 17 833 people were under sentence of death at the end of 2010. — Guardian News & Media 2011