Ignoring appeals from human rights groups, Vietnam has sentenced at least 100 people to death so far this year and the country's get-tough-on-crime policy shows no signs of letting up.
In handing down two death sentences to drug traffickers on Monday in the central province of Khanh Hoa, the communist nation reached the 100 mark for the year.
Over the same period, at least 62 people have been executed by firing squad, mainly for murder and drug trafficking, double last year's number.
The figures are based on information compiled by AFP from officials and state media reports. No official statistics are available.
In 1999, Vietnam reduced the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty from 44 to 29, but the this year's figures show it has not taken any real steps towards joining the abolitionist club.
"This is a very effective measure," Le The Tiem, deputy minister of public security said in September of the death penalty. "Once drug-related crimes are eradicated, we might consider changing our policy with lesser penalties."
The government has also ordered harsh punishments, including the death penalty, to be handed down in serious corruption cases, purportedly in a bid to restore its own tarnished image following a number of high-profile graft cases involving state officials.
The use of the death penalty in Vietnam is among a host of other human rights concerns for the country expressed by rights groups and Western governments.
The EU, in particular, has asked Hanoi "to stop executions for a while and take the time to study whether executions have any effects in the society," a Hanoi-based diplomat said.
The pressure to issue a moratorium increases whenever a Western national is handed a death sentence. Relations between Canada and Vietnam turned frosty when Nguyen Thi Hiep, a Canadian women of Vietnamese origin, was executed in April 2000 for drug trafficking.
She remains, however, the only Westerner to have been executed since 1975.
Last year Le My Linh, a Vietnamese-Australian, was sentenced to death on the same charges, but after intense pressure from Canberra her punishment was commuted in July to life imprisonment.
Vietnamese criminals, however, are rarely granted such a reprieve.
The use of the death penalty particularly worries the international abolitionist lobby because of the inherent unfairness of Vietnam's heavily politicized legal system.
Defendants are seldom able to choose their lawyers, who in turn have very little access to their clients. According to an expert cited by the US State Department more than 95 percent of people brought to trial are found guilty.
"Routinely unfair trials in Vietnam mean that the death penalty is imposed under conditions which may lead to irreversible miscarriages of justice," Amnesty International said in August.
Such concerns, however, appear to trouble few people in Vietnam.
"Much of the debate appears to have been over the method used to carry out executions, not over whether they should be happening at all," Human Rights Watch said.
In 1999 Prime Minister Phan Van Khai expressed reservations over the use of the firing squad and there was talk of lethal injections being used instead but no action was ultimately taken.
Executions are carried out at special sites at dawn, where the victim is blindfolded and tied to a stake.
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