Egypt and Nigeria accounted for more than 1,000 of the death sentences announced last year, more than a third of the world’s total, Amnesty International said in its latest annual report on the death penalty.
The London-based human rights group expressed alarm at the 28 percent jump in death sentences: 2,466 people in 55 countries were condemned to death last year. At least 607 people were executed in 22 countries last year.
Neither of those numbers is complete, as North Korea’s closed-off stance means that no estimate there was available. Amnesty International also does not report numbers for China, where such information is considered a state secret. The Dui Hua Foundation, a US-based prison research group, has estimated that 2,400 executions happened in China last year.
Amnesty International also said it was unable to confirm whether judicial executions took place last year in Syria, where civil war has raged for four years.
The countries with the most recorded executions last year were Iran with at least 289, Saudi Arabia with at least 90, Iraq with at least 61 and the US with at least 35, the rights group said.
In Iran, hundreds more executions were “not officially acknowledged” and the total could be as high as 743, the organization said.
Once again, the US was the only country in the Americas to execute people last year, the report said. Texas and Missouri each carried out 10 executions. Other US states that put people to death were Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Oklahoma.
The overall number of global executions last year dropped almost 22 percent from 2013.
Nigeria announced 659 death sentences, mostly for murder and armed robbery, but a military court in December last year sentenced to death 54 soldiers who had been accused of refusing to join operations against the extremist group Boko Haram. The soldiers testified that they had not been properly equipped to go after Boko Haram, which has since pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group.
Nigeria’s higher number of death sentences, up from 141 the year before, was also a result of more complete data offered by authorities.
Egypt announced at least 509 death sentences last year, many of them in the mass trials that have been held since the ouster of former Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi in 2013. The practice has brought international criticism. In one case in December, 188 people were sentenced to death in the killing of 11 police officers.
In the US, at least 72 death sentences were announced last year.
Amnesty International expressed concern about countries that resumed the practice of executions, including Pakistan, which reinstated the death penalty in December after a Pakistani Taliban attack on a school killed 150 people, most of them children.
Indonesia yesterday began enforcing its newly ratified penal code, replacing a Dutch-era criminal law that had governed the country for more than 80 years and marking a major shift in its legal landscape. Since proclaiming independence in 1945, the Southeast Asian country had continued to operate under a colonial framework widely criticized as outdated and misaligned with Indonesia’s social values. Efforts to revise the code stalled for decades as lawmakers debated how to balance human rights, religious norms and local traditions in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation. The 345-page Indonesian Penal Code, known as the KUHP, was passed in 2022. It
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