Global executions increasing
A review of the the death penalty worldwide shows a fifty-four per cent increase in 2015
More people were given the death penalty in 2015 than at any point in the last quarter century, according to a new report from Amnesty International on capital punishment.
In its annual review of the death penalty worldwide, the charity reported that at least 1,634 people were executed last year, an increase of fifty-four per cent on the year before and the highest number Amnesty has recorded since 1989. This total does not include China, where the numbers of those executed are a state secret. Amnesty believes that thousands have been executed there.
According to the seventy-seven page report, Death Sentences and Executions 2015, the top five countries in the world last year that carried out executions were China, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the USA. The surge in executions – which Amnesty described as ‘profoundly disturbing’ – was largely fuelled by big increases in Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
The number of countries using capital punishment also rose, from twenty-two in 2014 to twenty-five in 2015. At least six countries which did not carry out executions in 2014 did so in 2015, including Chad, where executions were carried out for the first time in more than a decade. Amnesty found that in the majority of countries where people were sentenced to death or executed, the death penalty was imposed after proceedings that did not meet international fair trial standards.
