Iraq and Iran trigger global rise in executions

Despite a long-term decline in the number of countries practicing capital punishment, publicly disclosed executions jumped nearly 15 per cent in 2013 compared with a year earlier, largely because of "virtual killing sprees" carried out by the authorities in Iran and Iraq, Amnesty International said in its annual report on death-penalty trends.

The report, to be formally released today, said the number of publicly disclosed executions last year totaled 778, compared with 682 in 2012. The data excludes capital punishment in China, which regards information about the number of executions as a state secret.

Amnesty International, the London-based rights group that considers the abolition of the death penalty a top priority, considers China to be the world’s top executioner, killing more defendants than all other countries combined, but adds that reliable data is impossible to obtain.

In a statement released before the 2013 report's publication, Amnesty's secretary-general, Salil Shetty, attributed the increase in the publicly disclosed number of capital punishments to "alarming levels of executions in an isolated group of countries," a reference that focused on Iran and Iraq.

“The virtual killing sprees we saw in countries like Iran and Iraq were shameful,” Mr Shetty said.

"But those states who cling to the death penalty are on the wrong side of history and are, in fact, growing more and more isolated." Excluding China, the Amnesty report said, the other top state executioners in 2013 were Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Amnesty said that Iran carried out 369 officially acknowledged executions, but that the real figure might well have exceeded 700. “Credible sources pointed to many hundreds more taking place in secret,” the report said. In Iraq, Amnesty said that at least 169 people were put to death, an increase of almost one-third compared with 2012, and that “the vast majority were convicted under vague antiterrorism laws.”

It said that Saudi Arabia executed at least 79 people in 2013 and that for the first time in three years, three juvenile offenders were among those killed, in violation of international law.

The United States, the only country to practice the death penalty in the Americas, executed 39 people last year, four fewer than the year before, and Texas accounted for 41 per cent of them. But Maryland became the 18th state to abolish the death penalty.

The Amnesty report said a number of countries that had carried out executions in 2012 did not do so in 2013, including Gambia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan. It said Belarus also did not execute anyone, which made Europe and Central Asia an execution-free zone for the first time since 2009.

The report said that the method of executions last year included beheading, electrocution, firing squad, hanging and lethal injections, and that public executions were held in Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

While the annual death totals increased, the report emphasized that 37 countries had practiced the death penalty 20 years ago, compared with 22 last year.

New York Times