By KUNA,
London : An estimated 374 people will be executed in China during the Olympic Games, Amnesty International said on Tuesday.
A new league table of the world’s top executioners shows China used capital punishment 470 times last year, but campaigners believe the true figure may be 8,000.
The human rights group called on Olympic athletes and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to press for greater openness about executions by the controversial host country.
Amnesty’s UK director Miss Kate Allen said, “As the world’s biggest executioner, China gets the ‘gold medal’ for global executions”.
“According to reliable estimates, on average China secretly executes around 22 prisoners every day, that’s 374 people during the Olympic Games”.
“Everyone involved in this year’s Olympics, especially the IOC, should be pressing China to reveal the extent of its use of the death penalty, to reduce the 60-plus crimes for which it can be imposed and to move toward abolition”, she added.
Chinese criminal law professor Liu Renwen estimated in 2006 that 8,000 executions take place annually in China, which hosts the 29th Olympiad in Beijing from August 8 to 24.The US-based Dui Hua Foundation estimated that 7, 500 to 8,000 executions took place in the same year.
Nearly 70 crimes can carry the death penalty in China including tax fraud, stealing Value Added Tax (VAT) receipts, damaging electric power facilities, selling counterfeit medicine, embezzlement, accepting bribes and drugs offences.
In total, today’s league table showed there were 1,250 people executed worldwide last year, down from 1,591 in the previous 12 months. Amnesty said.
There was a large rise in the number of executions in Iran, at least 317 people, up from 177, and Saudi Arabia, where the total rose from 39 to at least 143.
Last year Albania, Rwanda and the Cook Islands abolished the death penalty, bringing the total number of countries to have done so to 135, the human rights organisation said.
Executions in the United States, usually one of the world’s biggest users of the death penalty, dropped to 42 in 2007, the lowest since 1994.
The top five executioners in 2007 were: China (470 plus), Iran (317 plus), Saudi Arabia (143 plus), Pakistan (135 plus) and the US (42), Amnesty concluded.