April 15, 2016
Amnesty International reports that executions around the world soared last year, with Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia all killing much larger numbers of people.
The biggest toll continues to be in China, although Amnesty International has given up trying to get numbers from there. One AI official said China likely executed more people than all the rest of the world combined.
On a per capita basis, the Islamic Republic continued to execute more people than any other country in the world, however.
Iran executed at least 977 people in 2015, a hike of 31 percent. Pakistan was next with 326, up from zero the previous year. Pakistan abolished execution seven years ago but resumed the practice last year after a Taliban massacre at a school. Saudi Arabia followed in fourth place with 158 executions, a hike of 76 percent.
Then there was a huge dropoff to just 28 executed by the fifth ranked country, the United States, the lowest US total since 1991. No one was executed by the federal government. Texas, as usual, led the states with 13 executions, followed by Missouri with six, Georgia five, Florida two and Oklahoma and Virginia one each The other 44 states executed no one.
Those four countries accounted for 91 percent of the (non-China) executions in the world last year.
Amnesty International’s Secretary General Salil Shetty said four countries abolished the death penalty for all crimes in 2015 — Republic of Congo, Fiji, Madagascar and Surinam — bringing the global total of countries now banning executions to 102. There are 193 countries in the UN, so a majority has now abolished execution.
When Amnesty Internation- al began campaigning against the death penalty in 1977, only 16 countries had fully abolished the death penalty.
Amnesty said it received information that both Iran and Pakistan executed people in 2015 who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed, and it said juveniles face the death sentence in several other countries. It said Iran executed four such people.
