Inching towards abolition

From a report in the Economist (subscription required) on capital punishment:

According to Amnesty International's latest report, "at least" (precise figures are hard to get) 1,591 executions were carried out worldwide last year, well down on the previous year, but nearly 40% higher than in 2003. Yet Piers Bannister, the lobby group's death-penalty specialist, believes that the world is gradually inching its way towards abolition.

That may sound wildly optimistic. But he says the important point is not the number of executions, which fluctuates from year to year, but the number of countries that carry out executions. This total has fallen steadily from 40 a decade ago to just 25 last year. Since 1985, 55 countries have ended the death penalty or, having already limited it to "extraordinary" crimes (such as those committed in wartime), have now banned it outright.

During the same period, only four states have reintroduced the death penalty. Two of them, Nepal and the Philippines, have since abolished it again; in the other two, the Gambia and Papua New Guinea, there have been no executions.

Big swathes of the world have become execution-free: 89 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes, another ten for all but exceptional crimes, and a further 30 are abolitionist in practice, having executed nobody for at least a decade. Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, has called for the complete abolition of the death penalty. In Europe, where abolition of capital punishment is a condition of membership of both the European Union and the 46-nation Council of Europe (of which Russia is a member), Belarus is the only country that still uses it. In Africa, only four countries carried out the death penalty last year. And in the Americas, the United States is the only country to have executed anybody since 2003. Only Asia and the Middle East seem largely untouched by the global movement away from the death penalty.

Even China, the world's top executioner - which reports carrying out 1,010 death sentences last year, though the real number may be nearer 8,000 - might be having second thoughts. Since January 1st all death sentences have had first to be approved by the Supreme People's Court - a practice that had been suspended after the launch of China's "strike hard" crackdown on crime in 2003, when publicly admitted executions soared to more than 7,000. In their annual report to parliament last month, representatives of China's chief legal bodies, including the Supreme People's Court, the public prosecutor's office and the ministries for justice and the police, urged a reduction in use of the death penalty (as well as torture).

Here's a catalogue of what needs to be done away with:

Methods of execution vary widely. Since 2000, the condemned have been put to death by stoning (in Afghanistan and Iran), stabbing (in Somalia), beheading (in Saudi Arabia and Iraq), electrocution (in the American states of Virgina, South Carolina and Alabama), shooting (in China, Belarus, Somalia, Taiwan, and other countries), hanging (in Egypt, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Pakistan, Singapore and elsewhere), and lethal injection (in China, Guatemala, the Philippines, Thailand and America).