The city of Beijing will use only lethal injections to execute condemned prisoners instead of shooting them, state media said yesterday.
The Beijing Municipal High People’s Court is preparing for the change by the end of this year by training police and medical staff to administer the injections, the China Daily newspaper said. The change applies only to the Chinese capital, following similar changes in other areas.
China executes more people every year than any other country in the world, with 5,000 executions expected to take place this year, according to the San Francisco-based Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights monitoring group.
Beijing began using lethal injections in June 2000 to execute some criminals, the paper said, but will now execute all prisoners this way.
Hu Yunteng (胡雲騰), director general of the research bureau of the Supreme People’s Court, told the newspaper that lethal injections are considered more humane.
“Lethal injection ... is considered more humane as it reduces criminals’ fear and pain compared with a gunshot execution,” he was quoted as saying.
Beijing now executes most prisoners by shooting them, but it is unknown whether sentences are carried out by firing squad or a single shot.
Hu told the China Daily that lethal injections are already used for only a small number of executions throughout China, but no figures were given.
Rights group Amnesty International has opposed the expansion of China’s lethal injection program, calling for an end to the death penalty in the country.
Since 2007, every death sentence passed in China must be reviewed by the Supreme People’s Court before it is carried out.
The high court had relinquished the right of final review to speed up hearings and executions during an anti-crime drive in the 1980s. The court’s right was restored in January 2007 following a series of scandals involving miscarriage of justice and false prosecutions.
Four people jailed in the landmark Hong Kong national security trial of "47 democrats" accused of conspiracy to commit subversion were freed today after more than four years behind bars, the second group to be released in a month. Among those freed was long-time political and LGBTQ activist Jimmy Sham (岑子杰), who also led one of Hong Kong’s largest pro-democracy groups, the Civil Human Rights Front, which disbanded in 2021. "Let me spend some time with my family," Sham said after arriving at his home in the Kowloon district of Jordan. "I don’t know how to plan ahead because, to me, it feels
Poland is set to hold a presidential runoff election today between two candidates offering starkly different visions for the country’s future. The winner would succeed Polish President Andrzej Duda, a conservative who is finishing his second and final term. The outcome would determine whether Poland embraces a nationalist populist trajectory or pivots more fully toward liberal, pro-European policies. An exit poll by Ipsos would be released when polls close today at 9pm local time, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. Final results are expected tomorrow. Whoever wins can be expected to either help or hinder the
North Korea has detained another official over last week’s failed launch of a warship, which damaged the naval destroyer, state media reported yesterday. Pyongyang announced “a serious accident” at Wednesday last week’s launch ceremony, which crushed sections of the bottom of the new destroyer. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un called the mishap a “criminal act caused by absolute carelessness.” Ri Hyong-son, vice department director of the Munitions Industry Department of the Party Central Committee, was summoned and detained on Sunday, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported. He was “greatly responsible for the occurrence of the serious accident,” it said. Ri is the fourth person
The collapse of the Swiss Birch glacier serves as a chilling warning of the escalating dangers faced by communities worldwide living under the shadow of fragile ice, particularly in Asia, experts said. Footage of the collapse on Wednesday showed a huge cloud of ice and rubble hurtling down the mountainside into the hamlet of Blatten. Swiss Development Cooperation disaster risk reduction adviser Ali Neumann said that while the role of climate change in the case of Blatten “still needs to be investigated,” the wider impacts were clear on the cryosphere — the part of the world covered by frozen water. “Climate change and
RSS