Amnesty International (AI) has detected a “worrying increase” in executions and death sentences in 2021with a rise of 20% compared to the previous year as a result, among other factors, of the end of the restrictions due to covid-19, as revealed in its annual report.
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The humanitarian organization explained that some of the “most prolific executioners in the world” have resumed these practices, taking advantage of the return of the activity to the courts and expressly cited Iran, Saudi Arabia or Burma (Myanmar).
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In his analysis, AI estimates the total number of executions committed in 18 countries during the past year at 579, of which 314 correspond to Iranputting the Tehran regime at its highest rate since 2017.
In the Iranian case, he attributes it, in part, to the increase in drug-related executions, although international law prohibits capital punishment for crimes other than those involving intentional homicide, according to Amnesty.
Likewise, executions “more than doubled” in 2021 in Saudi Arabia, where during just one day in March the authorities killed 81 people.
AI Secretary General Agnès Callamard lamented in a statement that, after reducing their numbers in 2020, those two countries increased their use of the death penalty again in 2021, “reaching unabashedly violating the prohibitions established in the International Law of human rights”.
“Torture and other ill-treatment were prohibited under international law decades ago, yet there is still no global regulation of the trade in goods used to inflict these abuses. This report is a milestone in the UN’s work to fix this fundamental flaw,” said @AgnesCallamard
2/5
— verity coyle (@veritycoyle) May 31, 2022
Regarding convictions, the organization indicated that after the lifting of the restrictions due to the pandemic, which had delayed judicial processes, “at least 2,052 death sentences were handed down in 56 countries”, 40% more than in 2020.
The biggest gains were in Bangladesh (going from at least 113 to 181), India (from 77 to 114), and Pakistan (from 49 to 129).
“Instead of seizing the opportunities that arose from the disruptions of 2020, a small number of states showed worrying enthusiasm in opting for the death penalty over effective solutions to crime, displaying a callous disregard for the right to life despite urgent and continuing global human rights crises,” Callamard stressed.
China, North Korea and Vietnam continued to hide their use of the death penalty under layers of secrecy.
Despite these setbacks, AI highlighted that the total number of executions recorded in 2021 is the second lowest number, after 2020, that AI has recorded since at least 2010.
Nevertheless, The NGO recalled that the total figures do not include the executions and convictions of “the thousands of people” who believes that they have suffered from these practices in countries such as North Korea, Vietnam or China.
The death penalty, lamented AI, is also an instrument of state repression to control minorities and protesters, as was demonstrated during 2021 in Myanmar with an “alarming increase” detected after the application of martial law in the Asian country.
The transfer of judicial powers to the Burmese military gave way to “summary proceedings without the right of appeal” and “around 90 people were arbitrarily sentenced to death”, many of them “in absentia”, in what “was widely interpreted as a selective campaign against protesters and journalists”.
The global figures are “alarming”, AI insisted, although it celebrated that 2021 maintained a “positive global trend” towards abolition, with important steps in this regard, for example, in Sierra Leone, Kazakhstan, Papua New Guinea, Malaysia, the Republic Central African and Ghana.
The United States is also making progress, after Virginia became the 23rd abolitionist state and the first in the South to abolish the death penaltywhile, for the third year in a row, Ohio rescheduled or suspended all planned executions.
In parallel, AI noted, the new administration in Washington established a temporary moratorium on federal executions in July, resulting in the lowest number of executions since 1988.
concern about war
In Ukraine, Ukrainian soldiers from the Azov battalion who surrendered in Mariupol face the death penalty, a minister in the pro-Russian breakaway territory of Donetsk said on Monday.
“All prisoners of war are in the territory of the DPR” (Donetsk People’s Republic) declared on Russian television Yuri Sirovatko, Minister of Justice of this self-proclaimed republic in eastern Ukraine.
These crimes can be punished in our territory with capital punishment, the death penalty
“Specifically, we have 2,300 prisoners of war from the Azovstal (steel mill),” explained Sirovatko, who stated that the “Azov” battalion is considered a terrorist organization and that its members “will be the subject of criminal investigations” in the face of a judicial process. .
The last Ukrainian defenders of Mariupol, entrenched in the huge Azovstal steelworks, surrendered to Russian forces between May 16 and 20, after three months of intense fighting.
The Russian authorities treat the members of the Azov battalion, founded by Ukrainian nationalists, as “neo-Nazis”, and plan to try them as war criminals, not prisoners of war.
On Saturday, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Prime Minister Olaf Scholz called on Russian leader Vladimir Putin to release them.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from EFE and AFP
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