Don’t rejoice yet
BY ONE MEASURE, at least, the world might be getting a bit less grisly. The number of death sentences carried out worldwide fell by 30%, from 993 in 2017 to 690 last year, according to the latest annual count published by Amnesty International, a human-rights organisation.
Those numbers are consistent with the downward trend since a recent high in 2015, when 1,634 people were executed. A reason to rejoice? Perhaps not. Amnesty’s count includes only known executions, so should be treated as the lowest possible estimate of judicial killings. China, which is considered the most ruthless country when it comes to capital punishment, has not been included in the total since 2009. Executions there are thought to be in the thousands.Belarus and Vietnam classify executions as a state secret. Accurate information is difficult to obtain and verify for other countries such as Laos, North Korea and Syria. Therefore the 30% drop, though welcome, should be treated with caution.Although executions are declining, the number of death sentences has hardly changed. In the Middle East and North Africa, the region responsible for two-thirds of all known state executions in the world since 2009, almost 90% more people were sentenced to capital punishment last year than in 2017. Egypt accounts for nearly two-thirds of those sentences. Pakistan has dropped from 326 executions in 2015 to 14 last year. But other countries are going in the opposite direction. Executions in America have steadily increased over the past three years; last year Japan put more people to death than in the previous four years combined. The recent downward trend in state-sanctioned executions may prove short lived.
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