Press
According to Amnesty, “thousands of people were sentenced to death and executed” in China in 2023. But Western countries also carry out the death penalty.
If you want, you can also find good news in Amnesty International’s annual report on the worldwide application of the death penalty: In 2023, the death penalty was carried out in “only” 16 countries worldwide, a historic low. In 2022, there were four more countries. However, these 16 states executed more people than in almost ten years. In total, the report published on Wednesday (May 29) lists 1,153 executions. Significantly more than in the previous year, when 883 executions were counted. It is also the highest number of executions since 2015, when Amnesty experts registered 1,634 executions.
However, the Amnesty report naturally only contains those executions that also become knownIn fact, significantly more people are likely to have been killed by hanging, shooting or lethal injection last year. In China in particular, “thousands of people were sentenced to death and executed,” the report states: “Amnesty International believes that the Chinese authorities have once again carried out more executions than the rest of the world combined.”
China, North Korea and Vietnam use the death penalty “excessively”
The People’s Republic only makes a few death sentences public. This is primarily when the authorities hope that they will have a deterrent effect. At the beginning of the year, the “suspended” death sentence against the Australian writer Yang Jun caused worldwide horror. The sentence against Yang can be converted to life imprisonment after a two-year probationary period, but this is not certain.
“Although the Chinese regime is trying by all means to conceal the numbers and identities, it is nevertheless clear that the death penalty is being abused on a large scale as an instrument of intimidation,” says Renata Alt, chairwoman of the Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid in the German Bundestag. North Korea and Vietnam also do not publish data on death sentences and executions; according to Amnesty, “executions are carried out excessively” in these two countries as well.
Amnesty statistics on death penalty: Iran sadly tops the list
Both Iran is the sad leader in terms of known executionsAccording to Amnesty, at least 853 people were executed there, almost twice as many as the year before. The death penalty was particularly often carried out for drug-related offenses and against the ethnic minority of the Baluchis. Iran is responsible for 74 percent of all known executions, followed by Saudi Arabia with 172 executions (15 percent). In the Wahhabi kingdom, people are also executed by beheading.
Alt points out that it is not only “autocracies like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia” that impose the death penalty: “Even close partners of Germany like the USA and Japan still issue death sentences,” the FDP politician told our editorial team. “The federal government must push for a rethink here in particular. We must not apply double standards, because executions are always a violation of human rights.”
“Psychological torture” in Japan
According to Amnesty, 24 people were executed and 25 death sentences imposed in the United States in 2023. Japan did not execute anyone in 2023, but did impose one death sentence. In addition, a Japanese court recently dismissed the lawsuit of a man sentenced to death. He had filed a lawsuit against the practice of not informing death row inmates of their execution until hours before the execution; Alt calls this “psychological torture.”
No death sentences were carried out in Europe last year. Belarus is the only European country to retain the death penalty; in Russia, executions have been suspended.
#China #executes #death #penalty #rest #world #combined