Some countries do not abolish death penalty amid pandemic

The unprecedented challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic were not enough to deter 18 countries from carrying out executions in 2020, Amnesty International said in its annual global review of the death penalty.

Amnesty International recorded 483 executions in 18 countries in 2020.

Report informs, citing the BBC, that Egypt more than tripled its reported executions (from at least 32 to at least 107). This data is reportedly wrong since 57 people were executed from October until November last year along. By unconfirmed information from the organization, Egypt executed 91 people in the last three months of 2020.

According to the information, a man was executed in China for violating the quarantine regime. Criminal proceedings were launched on 21 people in February 2020 for the violation of COVID-19 preventive measures. Of them, four were sentenced to death. Forty-six people in China were executed for different crimes. It is not ruled out that the figures on China also do not reflect the reality. Amnesty International claims that thousands of people are executed in China every year. The country is ahead of Iran, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia in this indicator.

After 17 years, the Trump administration resumed US federal executions, eventually putting ten men to death over five and a half months.

Excluding China, 88% of all recorded executions took place in just four countries – Iran, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

240 people were executed in Iran last year, a drop from 2019.

Amnesty International did not record any executions in Belarus, Japan, Pakistan, Singapore, and Sudan, despite having done so in 2019 and 2018, as well as in Bahrain, which carried out executions in 2019 but not in 2018.