Amnesty International Report: Death Penalty Use Down Worldwide in 2017

Use of the death penal­ty declined world­wide in 2017, accord­ing to the Amnesty International’s annu­al glob­al report on capital punishment. 

The human rights orga­ni­za­tion record­ed 2,591 death sen­tences imposed in 53 coun­tries in 2017, down 17% from the 3,117 death sen­tences it record­ed from 55 coun­tries in 2016. Executions also fell, with 23 nations car­ry­ing out a record­ed 993 exe­cu­tions, off 4% from the 1,032 exe­cu­tions record­ed in 2016 and 39% below the 1,634 exe­cu­tions report­ed in 2015. 

Two more coun­tries — Guinea and Mongolia — abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, increas­ing the num­ber of abo­li­tion­ist nations to 106, and Guatemala out­lawed exe­cu­tions for ​“ordi­nary crimes” such as mur­der, bring­ing to 142 the num­ber of nations Amnesty reports as hav­ing ​“abol­ished the death penal­ty in law or practice.” 

As in pre­vi­ous years, Amnesty’s exe­cu­tion total does not include the esti­mat­ed thou­sands of exe­cu­tions car­ried out in China or exe­cu­tions in North Korea and Vietnam, all of which treat infor­ma­tion on the death penal­ty as a state secret. Four coun­tries — Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Pakistan — which col­lec­tive­ly account­ed for 87% of the con­firmed exe­cu­tions in the rest of the world in 2016, account­ed for 84% of the world’s con­firmed exe­cu­tions in 2017. 

The United States dropped to 8^th in doc­u­ment­ed exe­cu­tions (23) in 2017 and ranked 11^th in death sen­tences imposed. For the 9^th con­sec­u­tive year, it was the only coun­try in the Americas to car­ry out executions.

Among human rights vio­la­tions, Amnesty report­ed that 15 coun­tries imposed death sen­tences or exe­cut­ed peo­ple for drug-trade relat­ed offens­es, with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore exe­cut­ing pris­on­ers for involve­ment in the drug trade. The secre­cy prac­tices in Malaysia and Vietnam pre­vent­ed Amnesty from deter­min­ing whether sim­i­lar human rights vio­la­tions had occurred in those countries.

“Despite strides towards abol­ish­ing this abhor­rent pun­ish­ment, there are still a few lead­ers who would resort to the death penal­ty as a ​‘quick-fix’ rather than tack­ling prob­lems at their roots with humane, effec­tive and evi­dence-based poli­cies,” said Amnesty’s Secretary General Salil Shetty. ​“The dra­con­ian anti-drug mea­sures wide­ly used in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific have total­ly failed to address the issue.”

Amnesty also cit­ed Iran for vio­lat­ing the human rights pro­scrip­tion against apply­ing the death penal­ty to pris­on­ers charged with offens­es com­mit­ted when they were younger than age 18. Iran exe­cut­ed five juve­nile offend­ers in 2017, and has at least 80 oth­ers remain­ing on death row.

Amnesty said Japan, the Maldives, Pakistan, Singapore, and the United States vio­lat­ed the inter­na­tion­al pro­hi­bi­tion on exe­cut­ing pris­on­ers with men­tal or intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ties or keep­ing such pris­on­ers under sen­tence of death. Amnesty report­ed that at least 21,919 peo­ple were known to be on death rows around the world at the end of 2017.