Death Penalty in the World: Amnesty International Report 2018

In 2017, according to data collected by Amnesty International, 2591 death sentences were imposed and 993 people were executed. However, these are partial data, certainly underestimated, given that in many countries there is a lack of transparency about them and, moreover, in a country like China, the most populated in the world, the data themselves are not made public, as they are considered “state secret”. Amnesty estimates that China alone carries out more death sentences than all the other countries of the world put together. According to the Amnesty Report, the highest number of executions are carried out, in descending order, in China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. The Report also notes that in recent years there has been a tendency to decrease in death penalties (in 2017, 4% less compared to the previous year) and that, at the end of 2017, 106 countries had abolished the death penalty for all crimes. The civilization process of the world, thanks also to the abolition of capital punishment, therefore, continues in an ambiguous and contradictory manner. It is not yet sufficiently understood by both the ruling classes and public opinions that, as the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in October 2017, “The death penalty does little to serve victims or deter crime”. In this context, and with reference to capital punishment, the area of the world that appears to be the most advanced is, with respect also to many other matters (think for example of social protection systems), the European one. In the western world, the United States still maintains the death penalty, and in 2017 there were 23 executions carried out. The United States and Japan are the only G8 countries to retain and apply the death penalty.

But death as a penalty is not only the consequence of a judicial process, which is what the Amnesty International Annual Report is dealing with. Death as a punishment has always been the “intentional point” of all wars, especially today, when the vast majority of deaths in war is increasingly composed not of the military but of civilians, women, the elderly, children. Wars condemn to death hundreds of thousands, millions of innocent people, and without any preventive procedure. It is useful to remember, among other things, that wars and death penalties resulting from judicial proceedings are nourishing one another. The civilization process can only be achieved through the definitive elimination of both. (g.b.)