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Overall worldwide, the use of the death penalty last year fell, but the good news excludes figures from China—traditionally the biggest user of capital punishment—because officials refuse to submit how many people were executed, a Monday report from rights group Amnesty International said.
The report, Death Sentences and Executions 2010, noted that most countries using the state-mandated execution “are being left increasingly isolated” after a decade-long period of progress. During the past decade, 31 countries banned the death penalty.
Excluding China, the officially recorded number of people put to death fell from 714 cases in 2009 to 527 a year later.
Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General, said that if China were included in the count, the number would increase dramatically and would be in the thousands. “China is believed to have executed thousands in 2010 but continues to maintain its secrecy over its use of the death penalty,” says the report.
Iran, North Korea, and Yemen were the next three biggest executing states, although Amnesty said it was not able to confirm figures for North Korea. Iran carried out at least 252 executions and Yemen 53.
Outside of Belarus, where two people were executed and another three were sentenced to death, Western Europe and Eastern European countries did not conduct any executions.
The U.S. executed at least 46 in 2010 and that number has declined in the past 15 years. This March, Illinois abolished the death penalty.
“The minority of states that continue to systematically use the death penalty were responsible for thousands of executions in 2010, defying the global anti-death penalty trend,” said Shetty in a press statement.
Moreover, the countries that extensively use the death penalty often did so for minor offenses like drug offenses, economic crimes, and consistently violated “international human rights law forbidding the use of the death penalty except for the most serious crimes,” Shetty added.
Currently, 58 countries still retain the death penalty for “ordinary crimes,” the report says.
Countries that imposed the death sentence for drug-related crimes last year include China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Laos, Libya, Malaysia, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Amnesty added that a “significant proportion” of these countries’ executions were related to such offenses.
In addition to China, North Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Singapore also did not give comprehensive data regarding the number of people killed via state-mandated execution.
Mongolia and Gabon removed the death penalty entirely in 2010.
