By Tenzin Monlam
DHARAMSHALA, April 12: Calling China the ‘World’s biggest executioner’, Amnesty International in its latest report demanded the Communist party-ruled country to come clean regarding their ‘grotesque’ level of capital punishment.
Published on Tuesday, the global rights watchdog in its report, ‘2016 Global Review of the Death Penalty, said that China’s horrifying use of the death penalty still remains one of the country’s deadly secrets, as the authorities continue to execute thousands of people each year.
In the report, the organization recorded 1,032 people executed around the world excluding China. Amnesty believes that China has executed more than the rest of the world combined.
“China wants to be a leader on the world stage, but when it comes to the death penalty it is leading in the worst possible way – executing more people annually than any other country in the world,” said Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
He also added, “The Chinese government has recognized it is a laggard in terms of openness and judicial transparency, but it persists in actively concealing the true scale of executions. It is high time for China to lift the veil on this deadly secret and finally come clean about its death penalty system.”
The watchdog also found that Beijing in order to cover up the actual number has resorted to deliberately misplacing hundreds of documented death penalty cases from the national online court database.
Classifying most of the information regarding the death penalty as ‘state secret’ under their secrecy law China only shows a fraction of the actual number, the organization says. It also reported that Chinese government continues to maintain ‘almost total secrecy over the number of people sentenced to death and executed.’
“The Chinese government uses partial disclosures and unverifiable assertions to claim progress in reducing the number of executions, yet at the same time maintains near absolute secrecy. This is deliberately misleading.” said Salil.
