U.S. in Top 5 For Executions Worldwide

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First, the good news.  In 1961, the year Amnesty International was founded, only 9 countries had completely abolished the death penalty (10 if you count West Germany).  By 1977, the year Amnesty International simultaneously won the Nobel Peace Prize and took up death penalty abolition as a priority human rights cause, there were still only 16 such countries (plus West Germany).

Since then, there has been a sea change.  As documented in Amnesty International’s new report on Death Sentences and Executions in 2010, 96 countries have fully abolished capital punishment, while only 58 actively retain it (and only 23 carried out executions in 2010).  The remaining 43 nations have the death penalty on the books, but do not really use it.  So, basically, more than two-thirds of the world’s countries are living without the death penalty. (And thanks to Illinois, so are almost one-third of U.S. states.)

But 1977 was also the year that the United States resumed executions after a ten-year hiatus. During the next couple of decades, while most of the rest of the world was beginning to see the death penalty as a fundamental violation of human rights, the U.S. was pursuing executions in greater and greater numbers.  And while executions and death sentences have declined significantly in the U.S. over the last decade, the use of capital punishment has been collapsing at a much faster rate worldwide, so that in 2010, once again, the U.S. ranked in the top 5 of the world’s most prolific executioners.

Other developments from the 2010 report illustrate why the death penalty is a grave abuse of human rights that must be abolished:

  • Another child offender was executed in Iran (48 such executions have been documented by Amnesty International since 1990), and more juvenile offenders await execution in Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
  • Sentences of death by stoning continued to be passed in Iran, Nigeria, and Pakistan.
  • And governments continued  to exploit capital punishment for the ugliest of political purposes, to repress dissent, or in the case of Uganda, to target homosexuals.

So, the bad news is that, in countries still employing the death penalty, its cruelty and cynical use a political tool goes unchecked.  The good news is that the number of those countries gets smaller every year.

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6 thoughts on “U.S. in Top 5 For Executions Worldwide

  1. USA is tops in Innocent Human Killings…
    Look at the figures of innocent people killed by US Missiles of last 10 years in other countries….
    And the Superpower gets away with it…, Its nature of the Powerful…,
    Before Second world war it was Germany and Japan…

  2. USA tops in Innocent Human Killings…
    Look at the figures of innocent people killed by US Missiles of last 10 years in other countries….
    And the Superpower gets away with it…, Its nature of the Powerful…,
    Before Second world war it was Germany and Japan…

  3. USA is tops in Innocent Human Killings…
    Look at the figures of innocent people killed by US Missiles of last 10 years in other countries….
    And the Superpower gets away with it…, Its nature of the Powerful…,
    Before Second world war it was Germany and Japan…

  4. USA tops in Innocent Human Killings…
    Look at the figures of innocent people killed by US Missiles of last 10 years in other countries….
    And the Superpower gets away with it…, Its nature of the Powerful…,
    Before Second world war it was Germany and Japan…

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