New Report on the Global Use of the Death Penalty Released by Amnesty International Amnesty International
go to original April 13, 2013

An animation created for the Amnesty International Death Penalty Statistics 2013 report. 'Death Sentences and executions in 2012'. (AmnestyInternational)

Only one in 10 countries in the world carried out capital punishment last year, as the global trend towards the abolition of the death penalty continued, with some progress in Africa, "disappointing" setbacks in Asia Pacific and great concerns about the Middle East, according to a report.

China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the US carried out the most executions in 2012, according to Amnesty International's annual report on death sentences and capital punishment, published on Wednesday. Yemen was not far behind the five.

Globally, at least 682 executions were confirmed to have been carried out in 2012, two more than in 2011, the 60-page report showed. However, this number does not include executions in China, which maintains a great deal of secrecy about its use of the capital punishment, nor in Syria, where documenting such figures was made impossible by the civil war.

Since 2009, Amnesty has declined to release estimates about the number of executions in China, which is believed to be in the several thousands, more than the rest of the world combined.

In 2012, only 21 countries were known to have carried out executions, the same as the year before. More than two-thirds of the world's countries - 140 - are classified as nations that have either abandoned the death penalty or are no longer implementing it.

Roseann Rife (Amnesty International): "Amnesty International is calling on the Chinese government to first off, implement a moratorium on the use of the death penalty. But one of the first steps needs to be an end to the secrecy behind the use of the death penalty, so to make the figures public, so that an open debate can actually take place.

The Chinese government is clearly moving in the direction towards abolition. I believe that the responses we've seen in terms of amendments to law and discourse we've seen coming from the authorities is moving in a positive direction. But it's impossible to really document that. So we can't really say that progress has been made yet, until we see the numbers and see the evidence to support this kind of discourse."

Audrey Gaughran (Amnesty International): "Its overall finding is that the world continues to move towards abolition, despite some very worrying setbacks in 2012. The most worrying things we have noted in the report are the resumption of executions in Japan, Pakistan, the Gambia and India and some of those have been resumptions of executions after many years without executions."

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