AI Challenges China's Continued Secrecy in Executions

by Barbara McPherson | March 30, 2010 at 04:01 pm

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Amnesty International threw out a challenge to China's rulers to stop the secrecy surrounding death sentences and executions in that country. China has execution as the penalty in a wide range of offenses. The AI report released today, Death Sentences and Executions in 2009, refused to put a minimum number of people killed last year in China for crimes. Currently information about executions is a state secret.

The death penalty is cruel and degrading, and an affront to human dignity," said Claudio Cordone, Amnesty International's Interim Secretary General. "The Chinese authorities claim that fewer executions are taking place. If this is true, why won’t they tell the world how many people the state put to death?"

China has many offenses on the books that will attract a death sentence. Many of which would not be offenses in other countries. Amnesty International also castigates the apparent lack of justice afforded to the defendant.

For defendants accused of committing a capital crime which touches upon political or religious issues that the Chinese state is keen to suppress, all legal proceedings can be hidden from observers by declaring that the case involves “state secrets”. This device excluding observers from trials and refusing access to information on evidence is often a veil behind which grossly unfair trials are conducted.

Countries Leading in Executions of Prisoners
The countries named are in order of most executions to least. For China the number is unkown but speculated to be in the thousands. Other numbers given are from AI and are minimums.