China ‘secretly’ executing thousands

CHINA executed more people last year than all other nations combined, Amnesty International said yesterday, even as death penalties in the world decreased overall.

The human rights organisation estimates the Asian giant alone killed “thousands” of people, a figure based on examinations of court records and news reports.

All other countries together executed at least 1 032 people last year – a decline of 37% compared to 2015. Of those, 87% took place in just four countries – Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.

Amnesty’s report found that hundreds of death sentences, including cases involving foreign nationals, had been omitted from China’s public database of court verdicts, suggesting a concerted effort to hide the extent of the killings.

The ruling Communist Party considers the death toll a state secret.

“China is really the only country that has such a complete regime of secrecy over executions,” Amnesty’s East Asia director Nicholas Bequelin said at a press conference in Hong Kong.

Despite local media reports saying at least 931 individuals had been executed between 2014 and 2016, only 85 of them were on the online database, Amnesty said. In 2013, China’s Supreme People’s Court ruled that legal judgments should be made public, but the decision included many exceptions, including cases involving “state secrets” or personal privacy.

Chinese courts have a conviction rate of 99.92%, and concerns over wrongful verdicts are fuelled by police reliance on forced confessions and the lack of effective defence in criminal trials.

The nation’s top judge, Zhou Qiang, apologised in 2015 for past miscarriages of justice and said mistakes must be corrected.

In December 2016, a Chinese court cleared a man executed 21 years ago for murder, citing insufficient evidence in the original trial.

However, experts say recent reforms have not been widely implemented.

New York University professor Jerome Cohen said China’s police had “unchallenged discretion to … extract confessions by detaining and torturing suspects for long periods.”

A 2016 report from the USbased Dui Hua Foundation said China’s average death row prisoner waits only two months for execution.

The United States executed 20 people last year, the lowest figure for the country since 1991. — AFP