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Jul 29, 2008 News
Nine countries have taken major steps over the past 18 months towards eliminating the death penalty, leaving just a quarter of all nations left to abolish the practice, according to the 2008 report from the group Hands off Cain.
“There are currently 149 countries and territories that, to different extents, have decided to renounce the death penalty,” noted the organisation’s annual report, The Death Penalty Worldwide, presented at a press conference in Rome Thursday.
Forty-nine countries now retain the death penalty. Twenty-six of these carried out executions last year.
“There have been so many positive moves towards abolition of the death penalty in the course of 2007 and the first six months of this year,” Elisabetta Zamparutti, editor of the report, told IPS.
“Nine countries — Rwanda, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Comoros, South Korea, Guyana, Zambia, Cook Islands and Albania — have moved in different ways to become abolitionists,” she said. Five of these — Rwanda, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Cook Islands and Albania — have now abolished the death penalty for all crimes.
In Africa, Zamparutti cited developments short of total abolition in Burundi, Gabon, Mali, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania. Amnesties were also handed down in Cameroon, Congo, Ghana, Nigeria and Morocco.
In 2007, no executions were recorded in Nigeria and Uganda, although there were at least nine in 2006. “We are seeing many positive moves in Africa,” she said.
But in 2007 the number of executions worldwide increased to at least 5,851, compared to 5,635 in 2006, Hands off Cain reported.
This was due to a big increase in executions in Iran and Saudi Arabia, ranked second and third on the rights organisation’s “podium of inhumanity”. In 2007, Iran was known to have executed at least 355 people, a one-third increase over 2006.
Saudi Arabia — the country with the highest number of executions per capita — executed at least 166 people, four times the number in 2006.
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