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| AFP/DDP/File Photo: Human rights organisation Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan, seen here in March 2006, said,… |
LONDON (AFP) – China carried out 80 percent of the world’s 2,148 known executions last year, while, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States accounted for most of the rest, Amnesty International said.
The London-based human rights group said in a statement that these countries bucked a steady two-decade trend toward the abolition of the death penalty throughout the world, with Mexico and Liberia the most recent examples.
“It is a glaring anomaly that China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the USA stand out for their extreme use of this form of punishment as the ‘top’ executors in the world,” Amnesty International’s Secretary General Irene Khan said.
Amnesty said at least 2,148 prisoners were executed in 22 countries in the 12 months to December 2005.
It added that some 1,770 executions were reported in China — although it suspected the real figure could be as high as 8,000 — and at least 94 in Iran, 86 in Saudi Arabia.
Sixty were carried out in the United States.
It said executions are also known to have taken place in Bangladesh, Belarus, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Kuwait, Libya, Mongolia, Pakistan, Palestinian areas, Singapore, Somalia, Taiwan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam and Yemen.
In China, a person can be sentenced and executed for as many as 68 crimes, including non-violent ones like tax fraud,embezzlement and drug offenses, Amnesty said. Sentences are carried out by shooting and lethal injection.
Amnesty warned that there are fears that high profits behind organ transplants from people executed in China might be acting act as an incentive to maintain the death penalty.
In Saudi Arabia, people have been taken from their prison cells and beheaded without knowing that they had been condemned to death, Amnesty said.
In the United States, which uses lethal injection and electrocution, two men were released from death row in 2005 upon presentation of evidence of their innocence.
Khan called on Iran — “the only country known to Amnesty International to have executed juvenile offenders in 2005” — to follow the lead of the United States in March 2005 and ban the death penalty for under-18s.
Iran executed eight people last year who had committed crimes when they were children, including two who were still under the age of 18 at the time of their execution. Execution is carried out by hanging or stoning.
Khan renewed her organization’s long-held call for the death penalty to be abolished, arguing that it was not a “unique deterrent” to crime and it was instead the “ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights.”
“It is often applied in a discriminatory manner, follows unfair trials or is applied for political reasons. It can be an irreversible error when there is miscarriage of justice.”
“The momentum against the death penalty has become unstoppable,” said Khan.
She noted that in 1977, only 16 countries had abolished the death penalty for all crimes. By 2005, that figure had risen to 86.
Overall, 5,186 people were sentenced to death in 53 countries in the 12 months to December last year, although their sentence will either never be carried out or has yet to be performed, Amnesty added.
Taken with previous figures, Amnesty estimated there were more than 20,000 people on death row across the world, describing the figures as “truly disturbing.”
Source: AFP, April 20, 2006
