By Naomi McAuliffe

AS we all struggle to find the light amidst this unprecedented global health emergency, reading Smnesty International’s report that global executions fell to a q0-year low in the last 12 months gave us a moment of celebration. One of our unifying beliefs is that we know, together, we can end the death penalty everywhere.

Every day, people are executed and sentenced to death by the state as punishment for a variety of crimes – sometimes for acts that should not be criminalised. In some countries, it can be for drug-related offences, in others it is reserved for terrorism-related acts and murder. Some have sentenced juveniles to death for allegedly stealing mobile phones.

An increasingly hostile environment for human rights defenders in Saudi Arabia saw the Kingdom execute a record number of people last year, despite the overall decline in executions worldwide. Saudi authorities executed 184 people – the highest annual number Amnesty has ever recorded in the country and the third-highest globally. Amnesty also documented an increased use of capital punishment as a political weapon against dissidents from the country’s Shi’a Muslim minority. On April 23, there was a mass execution of 37 people, 32 of them Shi’a men convicted on “terrorism” charges after trials that involved confessions extracted through torture.

One of the men executed that day was Hussein al-Mossalem. He had been held in solitary confinement and subjected to beating and other forms of torture. Mossalem sustained multiple injuries – including a broken nose and a fractured leg. He had appeared before the country’s Specialised Criminal Court, set up to try individuals accused of terrorism-related crimes but increasingly used to suppress dissent. Saudi Arabia’s growing use of the death penalty, including as a weapon against political dissidents, is an alarming development and one that should give governments pause when considering trade deals or other economic partnerships with the state.

Our new Amnesty Death Sentences and Executions report also documents the shocking lack of transparency by the world’s top two executioners – China and Iran. China regards capital punishment statistics as a state secret but numbers are likely to be in the thousands. Iran was the second most prolific executioner, sentencing at least 251 people to death last year, four of whom were under 18 at the time. Iranian authorities also secretly executed numerous prisoners, including 17-year-old cousins Mehdi Sohrabifar and Amin Sedaghat on April 25. They did not know they had been sentenced to death, and their bodies were scarred with lash marks, indicating they had been whipped before their deaths.

The secrecy is not reserved for the worst offenders; countries including Belarus, Botswana and Japan carried out executions without any advance notice to the families, lawyers, or in some cases the individuals themselves. There were some positive trends in our report: Japan and Singapore sharply reduced the numbers of people they executed, and there were no executions in Taiwan or Thailand, with Afghanistan halting executions for the first time since 2010.

The death penalty is an abhorrent and cruel punishment, and there is no credible evidence that it is a viable deterrent to crime. We continue our campaign to end this inhuman practice worldwide in the hope that the 26,604 people known to be on death row at the end of 2019 will face a future free from the threat of execution.

The author is Scotland Programme Director, Amnesty International