Top 10 countries for executions in 2008

In March 2009, Amnesty International released its report on Death Sentences and Executions in 2008. The table on the left below shows the 10 countries with the highest number of executions. Plus signs (+) next to the figures indicate that additional executions may have occured without public disclosure. For this reason, and because the figures are not adjusted for population size, it is not a fair ranking of the prevalence of capital punishment. In the United States of America only 9 states carried out executions in 2008. The table on the right is a Top 10 list of countries and states in the USA adjusted for population size.

The figures for executions in each state come from U.S. Department of Justice and the population figures from the U.S. Census Bureau:

• Populations of individual states in the USA (2007 data):
  http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/09s0012.pdf
• Statistics on executions in 2008 from the U.S. Department of Justice:
  http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cp.htm

Capital Punishment around the world

The death penalty has been abolished for all crimes by every country in Western Europe. In Eastern Europe the Russian Federation has held a moratorium on executions and death sentences for more than 10 years but still needs to abolish the death penalty in law. Belarus is the only Eastern European country which carried out executions in 2008.

More people were executed in Asia in 2008 than in the rest of the world put together (72 per cent in China).

The region with the second highest number of executions in 2008 was the Middle East and North Africa (21 per cent).

In sub-Saharan Africa there were at least two known executions in 2008: Botswana (1) and Sudan (at least one). But 362 people are known to have been sentenced to death in 19 African countries in 2008. In Rwanda, the death penalty was abolished in 2007.

In the Americas, only the USA and the Caribbean island state of St Kitts and Nevis carried out executions in 2008.

Australia abolished the death penalty in 1985 and New Zealand in 1989.

Executions of Juvenile Offenders

Iran executed 8 juvenile offenders in 2008.

The last execution of a juvenile offender in the USA took place in Oklahoma in 2003. In 2005 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty for juveniles was a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, because it qualified as a “cruel and unusual punishment.” So unusual that between 1990-2005 only nine countries in the world applied the death penalty to juvenile offenders. Source:
http://www.amnesty.org/en/death-penalty/executions-juvenile-offenders/…

• From 1990 until 2005 the number of juvenile offenders executed were: USA (19), Iran (18), Pakistan (3), China (2), Sudan (2), Nigeria (1), Congo (1), Yemen (1) and Saudi Arabia (1). Adjusted for population size, the United States’ execution rate was second only to that of Iran.

• After 2005, four countries continued to execute juvenile offenders:
Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
This is a clear breach of Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which they had all ratified by 1996.
 

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