Highlights: At least 883 people were executed worldwide in 2022 according to Amnesty International data. Six countries abolished, in whole or in part, the death penalty during the year. Amnesty International's global figures do not take into account the thousands of executions carried out in China, Vietnam and North Korea. The Islamic Republic of Iran is doubling down on international law, since its judicial system has also sent five individuals to their deaths before the age of 18. It even triples the bet, since people with mental disabilities were threatened with the same fate – which is also the case in the United States.

In its annual report on capital punishment, released on Tuesday 16 May for last year, Amnesty International lists at least 883 death row inmates who have lived their last day in 2022. It's...

Analysis

Global death penalty: Amnesty International sees surge

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In its annual report on capital punishment, released on Tuesday 16 May for last year, Amnesty International lists at least 883 death row inmates who have lived their last day in 2022. This is the highest level of executions since 2017, due in particular to the situation in some countries in North Africa and especially in the Middle East. But the small number of judicial systems that retain this practice in their arsenal continues to decline.

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• An update on the fight for abolition

In 1961, "in our early days," writes Amnesty International on its website, "it seemed unlikely that most countries would abolish the death penalty." Executions remain a concrete reality for many people today, and the NGO's annual report remains a valuable, if not perfect, or untransparent, tool to measure it.

But every year, there are reasons to celebrate, and 2022 is no exception. Over the past year, despite the serious "shadows in the picture", "remarkable progress has been made in terms of reducing the death penalty", Amnesty writes in its report.

The world has undoubtedly continued to move away from capital punishment and only a minority of increasingly isolated countries have actively used the death penalty. Six countries abolished, in whole or in part, the death penalty during the year.

Executions worldwide in 2022 according to Amnesty International data. © Amnesty International

Kazakhstan, Papua New Guinea, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic have banned her for all types of crimes. Equatorial Guinea and Zambia did so for ordinary crimes. The government of the latter country "has taken the decision, the great decision, to end the death penalty," said President Hakainde Hichilema on May 23, 2022, adding that thirty sentences had been commuted to life imprisonment.

We will work with Parliament to implement this process of transition to ending the death penalty and prioritise the preservation of life and rehabilitation while continuing to deliver justice to all.

While at the end of 2022, the non-governmental organization identified 112 countries that have abolished the ultimate sentence for all crimes and nine others for common crimes worldwide, this "positive dynamic" continues in Liberia and Ghana, two countries where the authorities have announced that death sentences will no longer be applied.

Bills to abolish the mandatory use of the death penalty have also been introduced in the Malaysian Parliament. ", notes Amnesty International in the press release presenting its annual work.

>> Read also: Amnesty International's report on the death penalty in 2022

• The question of international law

As a result, therefore, of these new abolitionisms: "The brutal actions of countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia as well as China, North Korea and Vietnam are today very much in the minority."

But beware, enough for the NGO to be able to count this time more executions than in its four previous reports, while in the People's Republic of China, among the world champion of capital punishment, these statistics remain classified as a state secret. "Amnesty International remains convinced that death sentences and executions in China still number in the thousands in 2022," the report says.

Amnesty International's global figures do not take into account the thousands of executions carried out in China, nor those in Vietnam and North Korea, where it believes that the use of the death penalty has been massive.

After the decreases observed between 2018 and 2020, the number of confirmed executions has thus risen again worldwide: at least 883 people were executed last year, notes Amnesty, compared to at least 579 in 2021 and about 500 in 2020. But in fact, these practices have been observed in only twenty countries.

Like Kuwait, Burma, the Palestinian Territories and Singapore, Taliban-controlled Afghanistan began executing people again in 2022, after a few years of lull. Above all, one public execution took place there, as well as two others in Iran, which is a violation of international law.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is doubling down on international law, since its judicial system has also sent five individuals to their deaths for crimes committed before the age of 18. It even triples the bet, since people with mental or intellectual disabilities were threatened with the same fate – which is also the case in the United States, Japan and the Maldives.

And it still doesn't stop there: of the eight categories of violations of international law in the application of the death penalty mentioned by Amnesty, Iran actually appears seven times. To put it even more simply, with at least 576 executions, this country accounts for just over 65% of executions recorded by Amnesty in 2022.

Special mention, however, to the United States, given the role that this country has attributed to itself in the world in the defence of human rights: it is indeed the only place in the two Americas where detainees were executed last year (18, in six states), while Barbados keeps a few people on death row (five), as did Grenada (one), Guyana (17), Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (one) and Trinidad and Tobago (43).

Even better: along with the latter country, and Guyana, the United States is actually one of only three places in the Americas to have sentenced individuals to death in 2022 (21 people in twelve states, compared to a handful in the other two countries mentioned above). Amnesty returns in passing to some decisions taken by governors, given failed lethal injections for example (in Alabama).

►Listen: "Seven winters in Tehran", demonstration against the death penalty

• Other regional trends

Taking into account estimates of executions in the PRC, Asia and the Pacific appears to be Amnesty's region that drinks the most blood from convicts.

In addition to Singapore and Myanmar's military junta – which last year broke a four-decade-old tradition by executing four convicts in questionable trials, including two opposition figures – Bangladesh continues to condemn at will, accumulate a large number of death row inmates on its soil, and take lives (four last year).

Moreover, even if no executions have been recorded, the death penalty remains little more than an abstract idea in countries such as Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Tonga, Maldives, Malaysia, Laos, Indonesia, India, South Korea, or Brunei.

If we remove China, this time, then 93% of executions recorded in 2022 no longer took place in Asia, but between the Middle East and North Africa, writes Amnesty, which notes that Saudi Arabia, with at least 196 deaths, "has reached the highest annual level" that the NGO has recorded for this country "in thirty years". ». Worthy of the month of Thermidor of the year II of the French Republic, some 81 people were even executed in one day, last year in the kingdom.

Egypt massively condemned during the last year, much more by the way (538), and carried out the ultimate sentence 24 times, which leads this country to complete the top quintet in the world, with four other countries already mentioned, namely the United States, Iran, Saudi Arabia and China.

Iraq practiced the death penalty in 2022, according to the report. Death also remains a legal risk in Syria, and people have been convicted in 2022 alone in nations such as Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.

For once, this is a good point for Russia, which, despite its exit from the Council of Europe, not only did not execute anyone last year to Amnesty's knowledge, but moreover did not sentence anyone to death, and no longer even has a registered detainee falling under such legislation. For good reason: with Tajikistan, the Russian Federation has maintained its moratorium.

Europe and Central Asia are excellent students. It is not possible to be a member of the EU, for example, by maintaining the death penalty. But there are still no plans for Belarus to join the Union either, especially as it is the last of the last on the continent in terms of the death penalty; The only judicial system in the "old world", in fact, to have taken a life last year, and "apparently" keeping a death row inmate on its territory at the end of 2022.

On the other hand, while a law removing the supreme punishment from Kazakhstan's domestic law entered into force at the beginning of 2022, and abolition has since taken effect even in the country's Constitution, no one has been executed there.

• The special case of sub-Saharan Africa

A few more words about Africa, and more specifically sub-Saharan Africa, where not only four countries took the path to total or partial abolition last year, but where the use of the death penalty decreased by 67% over one year and where convictions were reduced by 20%, according to data compiled by Amnesty. Only sixteen countries in the region have handed down this sentence, "three fewer than in 2021".

In total, across the African continent, eleven people were executed last year, three times fewer than in 2021, if Egypt is left out. This happened in only two countries in sub-Saharan Africa: Somalia and South Sudan, "one less than in 2021".

Botswana, Comoros, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Mauritania, Zambia have all condemned a handful of individuals in 2022, and they are not the only ones. Tanzania condemned eleven. On the other hand, the judicial systems of countries with large demographics, such as Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo or Kenya, pronounce the sentence even more often.

This is a rather good record, since executions have decreased. In 2021, there were 33 executions; In 2022, we had eleven. Both the number of executing countries and the number of executions have decreased. The number of convictions is also a small caveat, because States do not always communicate the exact number of death sentences, particularly in Nigeria and Kenya.

Anne Denis and the situation of the death penalty in Africa

Pierre Firtion

In addition, Amnesty is particularly concerned about Nigeria's jails, which seem full since they represent half of the continent's workforce (more than 3,000). But in places where no convictions were handed down last year, death rows are also quite full, albeit to a much lesser extent – in Uganda, Malawi or Cameroon.

In the past, Burkina Faso and Equatorial Guinea had abolished the death penalty for ordinary crimes. The death penalty for all crimes has so far been abolished by 23 countries on the African continent, while 14 other states, including Mali, are considered de facto abolitionist, having not carried out any executions for at least ten years.

All these data, some of which may seem encouraging to activists, show that the application of the death penalty worldwide, especially given specifically charged national or regional contexts, will remain a reality when it comes to taking stock at the end of 2023.

►Read more: Zambia: abolition of the death penalty and the crime of insulting the Head of State

Before the scaffold, "break your pipe"

The French law of 9 October 1981 abolishing the death penalty, the Robert Badinter law promulgated by François Mitterrand, is currently on display at the Musée des Archives Nationales in Paris. "One of the most symbolic documents in the history of the nation", marking the epilogue of a fight of more than two centuries.

Alongside this official document, whose presentation is "almost unprecedented" according to the Archives, under the portrait of Lamartine, still at the Hôtel de Rohan accessible free of charge to visitors: part of the scroll of the petition asking for abolition in 1838, which had been signed by nearly 1,800 people.

The exhibition, installed from March 8 to September 4, "incorporates a more intimate sequence and focuses on the career of Marie-Louise Giraud, a "maker of angels" condemned by the Vichy regime, and whose letter of appeal for clemency is exposed next to the response of Marshal Pétain, who confirms the sentence to the full capital.

Finally, visitors will be able to rediscover the expression "breaking his pipe", with the wounded of the Napoleonic wars, who placed one between their teeth for lack of anesthetic during operations. If they died, the pipe would fall. The symbolism will be taken up at the Roquette prison by death row inmates awaiting pardon and their jailers.

Global death penalty: Amnesty International sees surge

Global death penalty: Amnesty International sees surge

• An update on the fight for abolition

• The question of international law

• Other regional trends

• The special case of sub-Saharan Africa

Before the scaffold, "break your pipe"

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