Burma, which announced Friday that it would carry out its first judicial executions since 1990, belongs to the minority of countries which effectively apply the death penalty.
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Decapitation, electrocution, hanging, firing squad or even lethal injection: the methods planned are numerous, according to the NGO Amnesty International which published its last annual report on May 24.
Majority of abolitionists
As of December 31, 2021, 108 countries have abolished the death penalty by law, for all crimes, according to Amnesty International. And they were more than 140 to have abolished it in law or de facto, i.e. nearly three quarters of the States in the world. In its report, Amnesty classified Burma among the de facto abolitionist countries, having not applied the death penalty for more than 10 years.
According to the NGO, the latest countries to have ended the application of capital punishment are Kazakhstan, Malawi and Sierra Leone.
In 2021, Virginia became the 23rd abolitionist American state, a decision all the more symbolic since this territory holds the record for executions in American history and that no state in the former Confederate South had yet crossed not. Joe Biden’s administration introduced a moratorium on federal executions in July.
On the African continent, about thirty countries retain the death penalty in their legislation, but a good number of them have not carried out executions in recent years. In 2021, only three countries (Somalia, South Sudan and Botswana) executed convicts.
Belarus remains the only country in Europe still carrying out executions.
In 2021, some 580 executions in 18 countries
At least 579 people were executed in 2021 in 18 countries according to the Amnesty report, an increase of 20% compared to the 483 recorded in 2020.
Despite this increase, the last two years remain those with the fewest executions of capital punishment reported since 2010. Amnesty specifies however that its tally does not include the thousands of executions which probably took place in China, but also in Korea. North and Vietnam, due to data access restrictions.
Without counting these countries, more than half of the executions recorded in the world in 2021 were in Iran, the Islamic Republic having recorded 314 executions of capital punishment last year, a record since 2017.
In Saudi Arabia, after a sharp drop in 2020, the use of the death penalty (65 executions) there more than doubled in 2021 and will be even higher in 2022 after the execution in March of 81 people in a single day.
On the other hand, the number of executions fell in Egypt, from 107 to 83, as well as in Iraq (from 45 to 17). In the United States, 11 executions have taken place, the lowest figure in decades, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
To Amnesty’s knowledge, no executions took place in India, Qatar or Taiwan in 2021, although these countries had all carried out killings in 2020.
After a hiatus of several years, Belarus, Japan and the United Arab Emirates have resumed executions.
More than 2,000 death sentences
In 2021, at least 2,052 death sentences were handed down in 56 countries compared to 1,477 in 54 countries the previous year, according to the NGO. An increase partly due to the resumption of legal proceedings after the lifting of restrictions linked to the Covid-19 pandemic, such as in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, or due to the adoption of laws favoring the use of sentencing of
