Death penalty continues to rise in Middle East.
London (dpa) – There has been an “alarming” rise in executions in countries that still have the death penalty, with Middle Eastern states seeing a 50 percent increase in recorded executions in 2011, according to Amnesty International.
The sharp increase in the Middle East was due to four countries. There were at least 360 executions in Iran, 82 in Saudi Arabia, 68 in Iraq and 41 in Yemen, Amnesty said Tuesday in its annual review of death sentences and executions.
The four countries accounted for 99 percent of all recorded executions in the Middle East and North Africa. The rise in Iran and Saudi Arabia alone accounted for the increase in recorded executions across the world by 149, compared to the total in 2010.
However, the overall number of countries using capital punishment decreased by more than a third compared to a decade ago, Amnesty said.
Just 10 percent of all countries – 20 of 198 – carried out executions in 2011. “The vast majority of countries have moved away from using the death penalty,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty’s secretary general.
“Even among the small group of countries that executed in 2011, we can see gradual progress,” said Shetty. “It is not going to happen overnight but we are determined that we will see the day when the death penalty is consigned to history.”
“Our message to the leaders of the isolated minority of countries that continue to execute is clear: You are out of step with the rest of the world on this issue and it is time you took steps to end this most cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.”
The report said people were executed or sentenced to death for a range of offenses including adultery and sodomy in Iran, blasphemy in Pakistan, sorcery in Saudi Arabia, the trafficking of human bones in the Republic of Congo, and drug offenses in more than 10 countries.
Methods of execution in 2011 included beheading, hanging, lethal injection and shooting. Some 18,750 people remained under sentence of death at the end of 2011, and at least 676 people were executed worldwide.
However, these figures did not include the “thousands of executions” that Amnesty believes were carried out in China, where the numbers are suppressed.
Amnesty said it believed that more people were executed in China in 2011 than “the rest of the world put together.” However, it had stopped publishing figures from public sources in China as these were likely to grossly underestimate the true number.
Amnesty said it had been impossible to ascertain the “probable extent” of the use of the death penalty in Iran, from where it had “credible reports of substantial numbers of executions not officially acknowledged.”
While the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East had changed the political landscape dramatically, initial hopes that this would lead to positive changes with regard to the death penalty had yet to be realized, said the group.
The continuing violence in countries such as Libya, Syria and Yemen had made it particularly difficult to gather adequate information on the use of the death penalty in the region in 2011.
No information was available about judicial executions in Libya in 2011, and no death sentences were known to have been imposed. Extrajudicial executions, torture and arbitrary detention were frequently reported instead, said the report.
The United States was the only leading Western country to have carried out the death penalty in 2011, executing 43 prisoners.
Europe and former Soviet Union countries were “capital punishment-free,” said Amnesty. Belarus, where two people were executed, proved the exception.
BM
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